The Best-Laid Plans
by Arameyy
Summary: Leo thought he'd know what to expect after getting reincarnated as Harry Potter. Except Harry Potter is now Lizzy Potter, Lizzy Potter is now Margie Dursley, and Voldemort knows something's not quite right with the Girl-Who-Lived. Throw in an unreliable wand, a shoddy memory of the books, and a tendency for half-baked plans and you have a recipe for disaster. SI OC.
1. Cue The Music

Note: The main character is transgender. If this bothers you, I suggest that you leave now.

Longer author's notes at the end.

* * *

Of all the dumb ways to die, it seemed that the universe had chosen the dumbest one for me.

It was a combination of unfortunate coincidences and really shitty luck that led to a piano falling on me à la Tom and Jerry.

I was part of the theatre tech crew for my school, and the set for the upcoming musical required an upper level with a grand piano. As a few people began hoisting the piano up via pulley, I had been crossing the stage ( _not_ below the piano – we had all been warned to steer clear, and I wasn't stupid enough to disregard those instructions) to grab some duct tape I'd left on the opposite side.

That was when the earthquake hit.

It wasn't a major earthquake; no giant chasms opening from the earth, no buildings collapsing. Probably no more than a 3 on the Richter scale at most. This was California, and all of us were pretty used to earthquakes. But still, the shaking was enough to send me stumbling under where the piano was, and enough to cause the two people lifting the piano to lose their grip on the ropes.

And that was how I died.

(A part of me was glad that I'd never get to see how people would react to my unfortunate demise. With my luck, I'd probably be known as the "piano girl", never mind the fact that I had a life as well as a death and that I wasn't a girl.)

After I died, I got neither pearly gates nor raging infernos nor simple oblivion. I saw a light at the end of a tunnel, felt a powerful push, and suddenly, I was in the world again.

It felt like no more than 5 seconds had passed since I fell, and the sudden change was completely disorienting. Immediately, I went into sensory overload. Everything was too bright, someone's disgusting baby was screaming, _what the hell was that stuff clinging to me_ , and _oh my god why does it smell like shit in here_.

I don't remember the exact chain of events after that, lost in the fog of my meltdown, but during all this a small part of me that was still functioning dimly realized that I must have been reincarnated. I managed to get my breathing under control, and opened my eyes to once more look at the world around me. I had been cleaned and swaddled, and the room had settled down. The woman I had been handed to – I refused to think of her as my mother – was having a conversation with another woman in the room.

"Thank you so much for helping with the birth," the redhead holding me said. A British accent, part of my mind noted.

"It was my pleasure, and I'm happy to see that everything turned out all right for you and baby Lizzy," the other replied.

That was when I finally got a good look at my surroundings, and realized that I hadn't been born in a hospital, but rather in a bedroom with a midwife.

Panic set in; what kind of backwards-ass family would refuse modern medicine and painkillers? Had I been sent to the past somehow? What if they had no access to any technology at all?

But oh my god, that name. _Lizzy._ I had known a girl named Elizabeth back in my first life, and she had hated the nickname Lizzy with the burning passion of a thousand suns. Now I understood why. There was just something so _grating_ about that name, and it felt like the kind of name you'd give a pet, not a person. I resolved that I would stick to my old name, Leo. In many of the self-inserts I had had the pleasure of reading, the protagonist would choose to go by their new name, no questions asked. Maybe I'd've been fine with that if the name Leo had been chosen for me, but no. It was _my_ name that I'd picked _myself_ , and no guardians would be able to do better. If they had a problem with that, they'd have to just deal with it. I'd be Leo, now and forever.

(During later reflection, I would attribute my unwillingness to accept a new name to the lack of 'death period' between my first and second lives. There was no timeless void, no nine months in the womb to distance me from my first 18 years. There was only the sudden transition from "oh shit, here comes the piano" to "oh shit, here comes the baby.")

With the revelation of my name came the realization that, once again, I had been designated female. Lovely. Wonderful. Another lifetime of misgendering and ridicule. Not that I would have had any less of a hard time being designated male, but at least then the pronouns assigned to me by default would be my chosen ones.

I'll skip the gorier details for you: the breastfeeding, the inability to control my bodily functions, et cetera. But needless to say, they happened, and it was absolute hell. For the first two weeks or so, I alternated mostly between sleeping and crying, neither of them willingly, as I was filled with loathing for myself, the universe, and my "parents". I ignored their attempts to play with me or otherwise engage me, barely consented to feeding, screamed whenever they tried to make me do baby things, and was just in general a miserable nuisance. I feel a little guilty about it now. It's a good thing that they had thoroughly baby-proofed the area around me and that I was incapable of moving my limbs, or else I probably would have deliberately choked myself with something.

At this point, I couldn't really do much on my own. I could flail a little bit, suck, swallow, and cry. I couldn't even turn myself over, let alone crawl. (I had been taking a Developmental Psychology class just before my death – it takes two months to roll over, five or six to crawl, about a year to walk. To me, less than a month had passed since I had learned these details, even though it was a lifetime away. Part of me still refused to accept that this was anything more than an elaborate hallucination induced by severe head trauma, or a dream as I laid near death in a coma in a hospital.)

The turning point came about three weeks after my birth, when one of the couple's ( _not my parents, never my parents_ ) friends came to visit.

The man was holding me as he went to get the door. "James!" the visitor greeted, and the two embraced. I screamed, hoping that if I made enough of a fuss I wouldn't have to deal with all this.

"Little Lizzy has a real pair of lungs, doesn't she?" the visitor observed.

There was the hated name once again. I screamed louder just to spite him.

"Yeah," the man replied with a chuckle over the sounds of my crying. "She hasn't slept through the night yet. She's running Lily and me ragged. But what's the news on the War?"

I let my cries settle down. It seemed I had been born in the middle of a war, which fell firmly into the category of Not Good. As much as I hated being an infant, I didn't want to be a civilian casualty, either, not that I'd be able to do anything about if a bomb happened to drop. Whatever news there was to be had, I needed to hear it, for my (hopeful) peace of mind, if nothing else. Maybe I'd get some clue as to where and when I was ( _Or what fantasy your mind has made for you,_ a more cynical part of me added).

"Moody's got Karkaroff; that's one more Death Eater off the streets—"

Moody, Karkaroff, Death Eaters.

James. Lily.

 _Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have thought of this the instant I heard those two's names!_ I would have smacked myself in the face if I had enough motor control to do so. Instead, my hand collided solidly with James' chest.

I tuned out the rest of the conversation, barely paying attention when I was shifted to the other man's arms. My mind was whirling with the implications of this discovery. _Your parents are James and Lily. The Wizarding War is still going on._ I had positively _devoured_ reincarnation fanfiction – I should have suspected something like this would happen the instant I found myself as an infant. But no, I had wallowed in self-pity, tuning out the world around me, while I was _in the Harry Potter world._

After that, I made an effort to be a more tolerable baby. James and Lily would never be parents to me, but they were nice people, at least, and they didn't deserve the misery I was causing them.

The conclusion I had reached about my position in this world was that I had ended up as Harry Potter's older sister – I didn't even consider the fact that I could be Harry Potter himself. So I began trying to work out a timeline in my head, trying to predict the birth of a brother who would never come. Lily and James had graduated Hogwarts in the late 70s, and Harry was born in the summer of 1980. They got married after graduating Hogwarts, and didn't conceive until after that. Allowing for at least six months between my birth and Harry's conception, I had been born sometime between spring 1976 and fall 1979.

As I began contemplating dates and ages, I realized that Lily and James were barely older than I had been at the time of my death, perhaps even younger. I had been 18 when I died; assuming I had my timeline right, they couldn't be older than 21. Thanks to my poor infant vision and the fact I always had to look up at them, I couldn't guess by their appearances whether they were on the younger or older part of that spectrum. I was frustrated by my inability to do much more than sit and wait. Not once did I consider the possibility of trying to warn them about Voldemort; who would believe a small child if not outright baby that their Secret Keeper would betray them and that a Dark Lord would kill them on Halloween?

No, what I began to do was plan on how to help Harry, and my first priority in that vein was surviving Halloween 1981 when Voldemort came calling. I burned at the idea of letting Lily and James die, but there was honestly nothing I could do about it. The best strategy, I decided, was to find a good hidey-hole and ollie outta there.

I was on the fence about whether or not I would accompany Harry to the Dursleys. On the one hand, as his older 'sister' (brother) I would be able to stop or at least mitigate some of the abuse he might receive. On the other hand, I would be opened up to abuse myself. I was leaning towards staying with Harry, though, since if I had the responsibility to make a child's life a little less miserable I should choose to take it. However, I was cognizant of the fact that the decision might very well be made without my input. Depending on how much older I was than Harry, Dumbledore might choose to put me with a surrogate Wizarding family if it could be reasonably assumed that I knew enough to be a threat to the Stature of Secrecy. Then, there were the Dursleys themselves, who might outright refuse to take in a second "waste of space" when I would offer no additional blood protection to their family, and I could end up in the Muggle foster system.

The next priority would be getting as much control over my magic as possible _before_ I started Hogwarts. This would be more difficult if there ended up being a large age gap between me and Harry, because then I would lose a few years' worth of practice due to the scrutiny of Lily and James. This also depended on how much of my childhood I spent with access to the Wizarding World's resources; I would have an easier time studying magic with direct access to spellbooks.

How much I would be able to help Harry depended, once again, on the age gap and the timeline. A small age difference would put me either one or two years above him, allowing me to help him with his school troubles – murderous teachers, magical creatures, and all – much more easily. The maximum possible age difference would put me out of school during Harry's 4th year. If there ended up being a larger age difference, I might end up with more influence during Harry's earlier years and be a greater help during the actual war, at the expense of not being present for Harry's later years at Hogwarts. My plan would have to be tailored to how much older than Harry I was, so I decided to hold off on planning the specifics until after Harry was born.

After that, I had a singleminded determination to be the fastest-developing baby the world had ever seen. A part of me still had the muscle memory of actions, even if my new body lacked the motor skill to actually perform them. I knew all the thought in the world would mean nothing if I just physically lacked the muscle and nerve and neural connections to perform them, but that didn't stop me from trying. So as the months passed, I practiced, with mixed results: trying to touch my nose without poking myself in the eye, lifting my head, making a few shaky steps across the floor.

I did have some relative success: I reached my major developmental milestones earlier than a normal baby. Bowel control still eluded me (unfortunately – I couldn't wait until I was out of diapers) but I prided myself on walking by 10 months.

I held off on talking until I was reasonably certain that I could produce coherent words – I wanted to avoid baby talk (and the probable cooing that would follow) as much as possible.

Something incredibly concerning, however, was the fact that I had yet to manifest any accidental magic. What if I was just as much of a Muggle in this life as I was in the last one? How would I be able to change anything if I ended up being a Squib? Part of me knew I was being irrational – it would be years before Neville first displayed accidental magic, and he still ended up a wizard. Despite that, my fear persisted

Time passed.

The war was still going on. I caught snippets of what was going on now and then – this family was killed, that Death Eater was caught, this location was attacked. I wasn't very concerned about it, because I knew that the Potters would be safe until almost a year and a half after Harry's birth. With this relief came guilt, though. Even if I personally was safe, there were still people dying out there. They weren't just lines of text anymore.

I silently celebrated my 19th birthday towards the end of winter. Thanks to my lack of calendar access, I was forced to guesstimate when February 5th actually was. As to how old I was, I knew I had probably lost a few months from the jump to the date of my death to the date of my birth, but I didn't know how long and I didn't feel like trying to calculate a new birthday for my mental age.

The Marauders visited periodically. I liked Moony the best – he would talk to me like an adult, to the point where I almost suspected that he knew the truth. (But I figured it was more likely that he just didn't know how to deal with babies.) He'd tell me about what was going on in life, holding almost a one-sided conversation. James would make fun of him for it, but I appreciated Remus's presence. I was kind of neutral about Sirius – he cared, I could tell, but I couldn't really love him when he still treated me like an infant. He was a good guy, though, and that he'd go through a lot of shit in the future, and he'd be like a father figure to Harry, and we'd probably get along better when I could hold a conversation, so I tried to be nice to him. As for Wormtail, I pitied the guy a little bit. He would kind of stand around, shuffling back and forth, while holding me awkwardly and looking guilty. I began wondering how early his doubts had started, whether he was one of Voldemort's followers even now. I tried not to hate him – he hadn't done anything yet, after all – and did my best to avoid dealing with him as much as possible, insomuch as a baby has control over its daily schedule.

Remus firmly established a place in my heart the day I spoke my first words. I was a several months old, and Remus and Sirius had come to visit. "Lizzy!" Sirius had greeted me. I had replied, "Not Wizzy, Wi'bef." Here were the various responses: Sirius proceeded to crow about how I clearly liked him best since I had spoken to him first; the Potters were only happy that I had spoken at all; and Remus began calling me Elizabeth. Even at less than a year old, to him I was a person with an opinion worth respecting.

(I would have asked to be called Leo, but I doubted that would be received too well at this point. _Baby steps_ , I told myself, _baby steps_.)

My first birthday arrived, with little fanfare. Me, Lily, James, and a little old lady who was introduced to me as Bathilda Bagshot. Bagshot cooed in my face and pinched my cheeks; I resisted the urge to vomit on her. I listened with half my attention as Bathilda told Lily stories about the younger Dumbledore while I tried with little success to eat mashed potatoes without getting them everywhere.

(Sirius sent me a toy broom for my birthday. James was eager to get me on it, insisting to Lily that I'd be a great Quidditch star and live up to the family name. Let me just say it was a good thing the broom was charmed to go no higher than a foot off the ground – I fell off it within a minute. James tried to convince me to have another go; I refused to get back on.)

Three months later, everything went wrong.

I sat on the floor, James in front of me, as he made colored puffs of smoke appear from his wand. I watched in amazement, though probably not for whatever reasons he suspected. (I was wondering about how the mechanics of the spell – was it willpower that allowed him to change the colors? Did this fall under conjuring? How advanced was it?)

Lily entered. "Looks like Lizzy is pretty impressed," she remarked with a chuckle. James scooped me up and handed me to Lily, dropping his wand on the nearby sofa.

"Yeah, she was really into it," he replied. "I'm going downstairs for some food. Want anything?" Lily shook her head, and James left the room.

Lily bounced me up and down on her hip, cooing about how I was her beautiful baby girl, et cetera.

Then the front door downstairs burst open with a bang. I screamed.

"Lily, take Lizzy and go! It's him! Go—run! I'll hold him off!"

Lily sprang into action, bursting out of the sitting room and charging into my room. She began moving whatever furniture she could in front of the door, with me still in her arms. The dresser, a lamp—anything that could possibly slow down Voldemort. She yanked boxes out of the closet, throwing them in front of the door.

I heard a laugh. "AVADA KEDAVRA!"

Meanwhile, I was in absolute panic mode. _This is wrong, all wrong, this isn't supposed to be happening know, where's Harry, it should be Harry, why me,_ the thoughts in my head looped. My pulse began skyrocketing, and my breathing quickened. _Oh God, there is no Harry Potter, you're Harry Potter._

Lily screamed, and I screamed with her. She stopped with her efforts to barricade the door, and instead began whispering in a language I couldn't recognize. I was still too much in shock to recognize it for what it must have been: the enchantment that would reflect the killing curse. Magic swirled around the room, almost tangible, as Lily cast whatever spell that was.

Her attempts at barricading the door had been for naught; this door burst open just as smoothly as the front door had. Lily ceased her spell, and the magic in the room vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

I caught a brief glimpse of Voldemort, wearing dark robes and a hood over his head. His features were serpentine, but he still looked mostly human – not the pale, red-eyed, noseless abomination from the graveyard and after. That was the only look I got before Lily deposited me in the crib. She stood between me and Voldemort, trembling but determined, as she spread her arms out as if to protect me. Meanwhile, I continued crying. How had I fucked up this badly, to not even realize that I was the one being thrust into all this?

"Not Lizzy, not Lizzy, please, not Lizzy!" she begged.

I couldn't even work up annoyance for that wretched name. Instead, I was marveling at the devotion, the pure _love_ Lily had for me, to do anything she could to save me, even to die for me.

The panic had faded to a dull background hum – I was having trouble processing the fact that this was all real, that this was more than just the scene I had read and watched a thousand times before.

But even if I could process it, there was still nothing I could do apart from let it play out. Lily and James would die, and I couldn't do much more than hope that I still held the same degree of Plot Armor that Harry had.

"Stand aside, you stupid girl!"

"Not Lizzy, please no, take me, kill me instead!"

"This is my last warning!"

"Please, not Lizzy, have mercy, please have mercy, not Lizzy, I'll do anything!"

"Stand aside—stand aside, girl—AVADA KEDAVRA!"

A flash of green, and Lily fell. Dully, I noted that, at some point, my crying had stopped. I stood, clutching the bars of the crib, as the Dark Lord approached.

Voldemort looked down at me with a sort of quiet determination, the shadows of the hood covering his face.

"Voldemort," I murmured, meeting his eyes. They were green, I noted silently, green like the Killing Curse, and slitted like a snake's.

I could see hints of the handsome boy the books had always said he was, but his features were distorted. He looked, in a word, predatorial.

(He still had the nose at this point, I noted with internal satisfaction.)

"Lizzy Potter," he acknowledged, slowly and deliberately moving his wand in front of my face.

I ignored the wand, continuing to look Lord Voldemort in the eye. _What the hell are you doing?_ The disconnected, rational part of me demanded. I tried without success to squash my annoyance at that awful name, and my urge to shake things up a little.

"My name's not Lizzy," I snapped, aware of the fact that my tone was nothing close to a two-year-old's. "It's Leo."

 _Why would you tell him that?! Stupid!_

"No matter. Avada Kedavra."

There was a flash of green, and then the room exploded. Pain erupted from my forehead, and I screamed as rubble began to rain down around me. Voldemort was gone; his robes were on the ground and his wand had fallen into my crib.

 _Wormtail's gonna come for the wand._ The thought materialized into my head almost spontaneously, a half-remembered fragment from one book or another springing to life. Thinking quickly, I stuck the wand up my pant leg, the only real place I could think of to hide it.

Not a moment too soon, because just after I had done so I heard the squeaking of a rat. Wormtail resumed his human form, a desperate look on his face. He dug through Voldemort's robes, searching for the wand, looking more and more panicked as he couldn't find it. I continued crying, trying not to give away anything.

Finally, more noise came from downstairs. Peter jumped up with a gasp, changed back into rat form, and scurried away.

Then, Snape entered the room. As he saw the body of Lily Potter, his eyes widened, a distraught look appearing on his face.

"Lily," he whispered, kneeling and cradling her body in his arms. "I'm so sorry—he was supposed to spare you, Lily, I'm sorry—"

I was thoroughly disgusted. In my first life, I had gone through approximately three stages of thought regarding Snape. The first time I read the books, before Deathly Hollows had even come out, I had hated the evil potions teacher who made Harry's life miserable. Second, after reading the Deathly Hollows and seeing his backstory revealed, I had thought he was a good guy after all. Finally, as I became more analytical and mature, I recognized that being friendzoned by Lily and bullied by James did not justify calling her slurs, joining a group of Wizard Nazis, arranging the death of the Potters, and doing his best to make Harry's time at Hogwarts miserable.

Snape felt no remorse over the murder of James and the attempted murder of Harry; he was only upset that Lily wasn't alive to fulfill his twisted waifu fantasy where she'd fall into his arms once her family was out of the way.

So I felt absolutely no sympathy for Snape as he grieved over Lily Potter, and was pleased to see him leave.

I had one more visitor before the night was over: Hagrid, who dug his way through the rubble to my crib while loudly sobbing over the Potters. I had just about dozed off when I heard the sound of him, and I let him pick me up without complaint. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to stay awake for the flying motorcycle ride – you don't get to see things like that every day, after all – but I was completely exhausted from the ordeal with Voldemort.

It wasn't until I had been handed to Dumbledore to be placed on the steps of Number 4, Privet Drive that the reality of what was going to happen now had finally set in. I was going to the Dursleys, the family that had neglected if not outright abused Harry for more than 10 years for the crime of existing.

As soon as Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Hagrid had taken their leave, I panicked. The letter that would doom me was right there, rolled up next to me. Somehow, I had to get rid of it. Maybe if the Dursleys didn't know I was related to the Potters they would just put me up for adoption, and I could end up spending the next decade with a family who cared, or at least wouldn't lock me in a cupboard.

But how would I get rid of the letter? I couldn't just throw it to the wind – somebody would be bound to find it and start asking questions. I briefly considered the oldest trick in the book, simply eating the paper. I even gave the parchment an experimental nibble. Not a chance; it was a lot thicker than the kinds of Muggle paper I was used to, and I didn't even have all my teeth yet.

I shifted, then realized that Voldemort's wand was still up my pant leg. That could be the solution to my problem! With a little bit of contorting, I managed to free it. I placed the wand into my right hand and the letter in my left.

 _Vanishing spell, vanishing spell, what was the incantation for the vanishing spell?_ It wasn't coming to mind, so I went with the next best magical alternative, praying with all my heart that it would work, that I wouldn't be a Squib.

"Incendio," I whispered, pointing the wand's tip at the letter.

Within seconds, the letter was little more than ash. The wand thrummed warmly in my hand; it had accepted me as its new master.

I grinned with triumph. Here I was, a former Muggle, physically 15 months old, casting spells with Voldemort's wand. Here, finally, was the proof that I really did belong in this world, that I was a wizard now. I doubted anybody else would be able to claim they'd gone through this experience.

 _Oh shit, the wand!_ I'd have to hide it somewhere so that Petunia and Vernon wouldn't discover it. They'd probably have me out of their house soon, but I would have to bet on the fact that I'd stay here for a few days and be able to retrieve it. Voldemort's wand would be my livelihood for the next decade or more; I'd be able to get a head start on spellcasting, and once school started I'd have access to a wand without the trace on it. And then, of course, was the fact that Voldemort would be without a wand – no 'brother wand' shit to deal with, and he'd be forced to settle for an inferior wand. (I didn't think about the fact that it might just start his search for the Elder Wand earlier.) I wasn't too concerned about the wand breaking, though. It would still put it out of commission for Voldemort, and that would just mean I could try cultivating a talent for wandless magic instead.

So I chucked the wand into the bush next to the doorsteps. Proud of myself for having come up with such an ingenious solution, I nestled into my blanket, finally falling asleep.

Less than a week later, as I was christened Margaret Dursley, I wondered how my predictions could have been so wrong.

* * *

 **A/N** : Hello and welcome! If you've gotten this far, I'll assume you're not about to flame me for writing a transgender character.

A few things about this story:  
\- Leo isn't a direct SI. I am not transgender, there are some definite personality changes, and opinions expressed by Leo do not necessarily reflect my own.  
\- I was originally inspired by Tozette and the Tumblr self-insert writer community, to which I was but a humble observer.  
\- No pairings are currently planned.  
\- I don't intend to do any bashing, but I do not like Snape.  
\- There's going to be heavy butterfly effect as the fic progresses.  
\- This won't be a curbstomp fic. You don't need to worry about Leo chucking wandless fireballs around by 1st year.

Thank you if you've read this far. Questions, comments, and reviews are more than welcome!

March 1, 2016  
Notes updated May 2, 2018


	2. Margarine

Let me start off with a few things about the name Margaret. It wasn't terrible, as far as names went. A little old-fashioned, maybe, but not too far off from the name I had been given in my first life, and I probably would have accepted being called that without too much trouble.

However, it seemed that the universe had decided, once again, to curse me with an absolutely god-awful nickname: Margie.

There were half-a-dozen good nicknames that could have gone with the name Margaret: Mar, Maggie, Peggy, Meg, et cetera. Unfortunately, they had decided to call me the one that I couldn't hear without immediately thinking of margarine. Thanks to Vernon's tribute to his sister, I got to enjoy the next ten years of my life with a name reminiscent of substitute butter.

("We named her after you, Marge," Vernon had told the portly woman, holding my tiny toddler hand and beaming with pride. I was forced to hide a grimace as Marge pinched my cheeks then declared that I was too skinny.)

With no letter to distract her upon first encountering me, Petunia Dursley was really incredibly responsible about finding a baby abandoned on her doorstep. She immediately dialed 999, taking me inside while she waited for the ambulance and ranting to Vernon about what kind of freak would abandon a baby on a doorstep in the middle of the night in autumn.

After a brief stay of a few hours in the hospital, I was given a clean bill of health, and I had fully expected to be taken to an orphanage, or a foster home or whatever. I was just some nameless baby; the Dursleys had no reason to care about me.

So imagine my surprise when I was handed right back to Petunia Dursley.

On the drive back to Privet Drive, I was panicking. Had they figured it out, somehow? Did Dumbledore meet up with them in the hospital lobby or something? Was I about to be dumped in the cupboard under the stairs?

I wasn't. Instead, I found myself placed in a crib in the second bedroom, and about a week later I was given an official welcome to the family as Margaret "Margie" Dursley.

Apparently, the Dursleys were more altruistic than I'd thought.

(When I later heard some of the neighbor women fawning over Petunia for being so wonderful a person to adopt me, I realized that perhaps the decision wasn't entirely made out of the goodness of their hearts.)

The next year was pretty chaotic. Adoption papers, immunizations, home visits – my arrival came with a lot of conditions. Despite all this, the Dursleys were able to maintain the illusion that nothing out of the ordinary was happening, and that the transition was a smooth one. The neighbors didn't see Petunia balancing both me and Dudley in an arm as she dug through a stack of papers for a missing document. They didn't see Vernon, purple with rage, trying not to shout at a pencil pusher from the nearby Family Court telling him that the adoption certificate still hadn't gone through. They didn't see Dudley throwing a temper tantrum as he realized that he would not be getting his second bedroom back.

I was reluctantly impressed at the Dursleys' commitment to upholding their image.

(February 1982 rolled around. The Dursleys had a wall calendar, so I was able to celebrate my birthday on the right day this year. Twenty years of existence and all I really had to show for it was a pilfered wand – probably long gone since I still hadn't gotten the chance to check for it – and a pile of media references that wouldn't be relevant for another _thirty_ years.

Except for Star Wars. At least I still had Star Wars.)

Since the Dursleys didn't know my other identity, they didn't know Elizabeth Potter's birthday, either. The family p(a)ediatrician estimated it to be somewhere in the early half of the summer, and the Dursleys decided to celebrate it on June 30th, one week after Dudley's birthday.

However bad the Terrible Twos are with most children, Dudley must have been a million times worse. His favorite words quickly became "No!" and "Mine!", and he was quick to throw a tantrum whenever something didn't go his way.

Petunia and Vernon gave in to his every whim, of course. My inner Psychology student was fascinated – was their overly-permissive parenting during this stage the cause of Dudley's future bullying habits? Then I mentally told myself off for thinking of them like a case study in my Psych class than like real people.

I wished there was some way I could have interfered to make Dudley a little less spoiled in the future, but his upbringing was really not my responsibility. Besides, how was a 2-year-old supposed to undo his parents' work? I had no real authority over Dudley, and he'd only resent me for trying.

During this time, my presence was both a blessing and a curse to the Dursleys. On the one hand, my calm demeanor was clearly _not_ normal. On the other, I wasn't solving all my problems by screaming at them like their son was. In the end, they decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth and took my lack of tantrums as a sign that "little girls are just naturally more docile."

When I heard Petunia sharing _that_ particular piece of supposed 'parenting wisdom', I began to wish that I had put more effort into being obnoxious.

(I still couldn't bring myself to throw a temper tantrum; it was below me.)

When Dudley and I were three, we had our first introduction to someone I knew I'd see a lot of until I made it to Hogwarts: Piers Polkiss.

David and Linda Polkiss had just moved into Number 5 Magnolia Road, and Mrs. Polkiss had invited Petunia over for tea. Upon hearing that the Polkisses had a son about Dudley's age, we were sent off to have a 'play date' with little Piers in their backyard while Petunia and Linda had tea on the patio. When Piers gave Dudley full use of his toys, I knew I had witnessed the start of a long friendship.

(I was promptly informed by the toddlers that I wasn't welcome to play with them because I was a girl and girls were boring. I wanted to correct them and say I wasn't a girl – not out of any desire to play children's games, just out of principle. But there was no way I could do that – not when Petunia was here and not to anybody who wouldn't keep it secret. It was 1984; I was pretty sure being transgender was still thought of as a mental illness.

When the mothers saw I was being excluded, they convinced the toddlers to let me in on the game. Unfortunately, Dudley and Piers decided to shift the game to 'put bugs in Margie's hair.')

At long last, the first day of school came. Petunia had me and Dudley decked out: Dudley looking like a circus in bright yellow shorts and a bright red polo shirt with bright blue shoes, me looking girly as could be in a pink sundress, my hair done up in pigtails with ribbons.

(I began to wonder if maybe this really was hell. The last time I had willingly gone out in a dress was twelve years ago, and I had no desire to do so again. As for the hair ribbons, I resolved to lose them at the first opportunity.)

Just before we were due to leave, Petunia pulled me aside.

"Now Margie, before you go, we need to cover up that awful scar of yours. I don't want anyone thinking you're abnormal."

Implied insults at your supposed 5-year-old daughter? Yikes.

I had only worn makeup once in my past life, and I had thoroughly despised the experience. I had no illusions that this time would be any better, but I wasn't going to demean myself by throwing a Dudley-style tantrum to get out of it. There was also the fact that it would be entirely out-of-character for Darling Little Margie to one, dislike makeup without having any experience with it, and two, be upset enough to throw a tantrum. As Petunia led me to the bathroom, I tried to convince myself that the best thing to do would be sit through it no matter how much I didn't want to.

 _Think of it from her point of view. Her precious baby girl has an oddly-shaped scar, and children can be pretty cruel at this age._ _She just wants you to be able to make friends._

(Never mind that I neither cared what five-year-olds thought about me nor cared about making friends with them apart from keeping up appearances.)

 _Besides, the ability to hide the curse scar could be useful when you enter the Wizarding World. Glamours aren't canon, after all, and there will certainly be times when you'll want to go incognito._

So I let Petunia apply concealer over the scar on my forehead without complaint, suppressing my grimace at the feel of it caked on my skin.

"When you're older, I'll show you how to do this yourself so you can go out on your own, sweetheart," Petunia assured me.

On my way out, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and the first thought that popped into my head was _that's not me._

Margie Dursley looked like everything I wasn't.

She had dark curls held up in a pair of pigtails by bright pink ribbons, framing a round face. Her eyes were a bright, almost familiar green, big in the way only a child's eyes could be. She had full lips, a small nose, chubby cheeks, and delicate brows.

By most people's judgments, Margie Dursley would be a cute kid – she looked like a little doll.

To me, however, every moment staring at her was torture. She was all that I had never been, and worst of all, she was a girl. I turned away, unable to look at my reflection any longer.

While this moment was happening, Petunia was packing up her makeup kit. As I turned away from the mirror, she swept me out towards the door. Making sure Dudley and I had our lunchboxes and backpacks, Petunia herded us towards the car to bring us to school.

As predicted, most of the subjects at St. Grogory's Primary School were far below me.

Writing was dull but necessary – my muscle memory hadn't carried over from my past life, so I was forced to relearn it.

Spelling and Grammar were frustrating. Those were things that carried over pretty well – apart from a few added letters unique to British English – so it was all I could do not to fall asleep and not to at least try to pretend I didn't already know it all.

History was actually the most interesting of my classes. In my past life, I had learned the major points of British history, but I had forgotten most of the details and never bothered trying to remember all the kings with the same name past when I was tested on them. So, British history was at least something fresh, even if they were just feeding us the sanitized, child-friendly version.

The more creative types of class – arts and crafts, music, that kind of thing – weren't bad. Art gave me the opportunity to do my own thing, and nobody cared if I was no good at it because _nobody_ was any good about it.

Math – I hadn't trained myself to reliably say _Maths_ yet – was my worst class in terms of interest and my best in terms of grades. I was certain my teachers knew something was up due to my effortless ease in the subject. How could I pretend to struggle through lessons on basic arithmetic when just a few years prior I had been doing differential calculus? It was intolerable.

(Our class took a field trip to the public library one day. While the other kindergartners went to the picture books, I snuck off to the high school textbooks, found one on calculus, and began to do a few problems. I was rusty, of course, but it felt nice to finally do something mentally stimulating. The image of a little kindergartner solving integration problems must have been ridiculous, though, and if you'd told me five years ago that my hobby would be calc, I would have died from laughter instead of a falling piano.)

Dudley made friends quickly – within a few weeks, he had put together a gang composed of himself, Piers, Malcolm, and Dennis to torment other kids on the playground.

I contented myself with only one friend, enough to keep up appearances, even if I had trouble thinking of her as an equal due to the 18-year age gap. Still, Mary Brooks was good company. She was quiet but curious, with an active imagination and a love for fantasy. I think on some subconscious level she recognized that I wasn't 5; she treated me more like an older sibling than a best friend.

What I'm most grateful for is how Mary unwittingly helped me retrieve Voldemort's wand from that goddamned bush.

As soon as I was old enough to walk, I had made attempts to get the stupid stick back. Unfortunately, I wasn't at an age where I'd be allowed to wander out on my own, and Petunia Dursley had eyes like a hawk. There were so many times when I'd begin to push branches aside thinking the coast was clear only to hear her shout "Don't go in there, Margie-kins, you'll get your dress all dirty."

 _I don't give a damn about your shitty dresses,_ I refrained from snapping back. I wished I had a good pair of pants – I didn't like having to put my bare knees in the dirt if I wanted to really get into the bush. But still, I complied, plans already forming for my next attempt.

(Petunia must have been so confused – Little Margie kept trying to get into that one bush without any apparent reason.)

Thanks to a playdate with Mary Brooks, my luck finally changed. Mary had come over to play for a few hours, and about twenty minutes in she suggested we go play outside.

"Mum, we're going to go play outside!" I called, grabbing at random one of the many dolls Vernon and Petunia had gotten me and letting Mary lead me out by the other.

"Be safe, dear!" Petunia called back, still involved with chatting with Mrs. Brooks over tea in the sitting room.

As I stepped outside, I was struck by the sudden realization that nobody save Mary was with me, and I had a reason to be outside.

An idea struck. I followed it.

I feigned tripping as we stepped out the door, letting the doll fly into the bush that I knew contained Voldemort's wand (assuming it was still there and unbroken after 4 years).

"Oh, let me get that!" I exclaimed, barely containing my excitement.

I sprinted down the three steps leading to the door, then turning and dropping to my knees in front of The Bush. Ignoring the dirt, I pushed the nearest branches apart and began my search.

The doll wasn't hard to miss, sitting right amongst some of the upper leaves. I paid no attention to it; that wasn't what I was really here for.

My face fell when I saw the wand. It was still in one piece, thankfully, but it was half-buried in the dirt, roots had grown rather tightly around it, and there was a spider web right between me and it.

Fate didn't want to make this easy for me, did it?

There's no feeling worse than spider webs. Still, I shoved my hand through it, not even bother to hide my grimace and shudder. This would (hopefully) be worth it.

I really questioned how worth it this was when the web's owner crawled on my arm as I was untangling the roots surrounding the wand.

As soon as I'd completed my task, I yanked my arms out of there, barely remembering to grab the doll on my way out. With a muttered excuse to Mary – who was giving me an odd look – about grabbing another doll, I ran upstairs in a mixture of disgust and excitement. I stowed the wand under the loose floorboard in my room, tossed the now-contaminated doll in the trash, then proceeded to spend the next fifteen minutes washing my hands and arms.

My hands _still_ felt sticky, and I knew I'd later have to clean the wand off, too.

I spent the rest of the playdate trying to hold back my distraction for Mary's sake, but I know at least some of it bled through. The next two hours seemed to drag on for days, before she finally left and I got the chance for some peace and quiet.

And magic; don't forget magic.

Wand already cleaned, I stood in my room, filled with anticipation. Here was the moment of truth: was I really magical? I hadn't managed a single bit of magic since incinerating the letter, not even anything accidental. Was this how Neville felt, wondering if he was actually a Squib? Only another test would prove to me that I hadn't just imagined the letter and Voldemort and the Potters, that I had once been someone other than Margaret Dursley despite all evidence to the contrary.

I lifted my wand, willing all my magic to it, and incanted, " _Lumos_."

The tip of the wand began to glow scarlet.

That was… not right. Despite that, my face split into a massive grin, because even if the color was wrong for some reason, there was still a light.

I could figure out why my Lumos was red later; for now, I would bask in the joy of being magical.

(Six years later, while flipping through _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1_ , I learned that overcharging the spell will cause the light to turn red.)

Confident in my newfound magical abilities, I began trying to master every spell I recalled, with mixed results.

I had a modest but functional repertoire of spells in my head remembered from the books. I recalled some basic utility spells, a small handful of low-level hexes, a fair amount of dueling curses, some of which fell into the level of slightly shady, and a number of Dark spells that I knew would be frowned upon by both Hogwarts and the populace in general, but still intended to learn. I doubted Voldemort would underestimate me again; I needed to be prepared.

Unfortunately, I didn't have nearly as much luck with magic as I thought I would.

At some point in time, I had acquired the idea that magic would be easy. Since I knew the spells, their incantations, and their effects, of course I would be able to get them with just a bit of practice. As Girl Who Lived, I'd certainly have enough innate power in order to cast more difficult spells. Besides, I was an adult, even if I didn't look it, so I would have more disciplined spellcasting than an eleven-year-old could ever achieve.

So it was an incredibly frustrating surprise as I tried and failed time after time to cast a simple Severing Charm.

The basic spells had come without too much difficulty. Incendio, Lumos, Alohomora, that type of thing. However, I experienced little success with offensive spells, especially higher-level ones. Diffindo, Bombarda, Impedimenta – I couldn't cast any of them. Desperate for some sort of victory with battle magic, I even decided to try my hand at the Unforgivables using bugs. Voldemort's wand should be accustomed to casting them, after all. But still nothing.

The worst part of it was that I had no clue what was causing this block. For some spells, I could understand why I couldn't cast them – lack of targets for stunners and disarming, lack of a good enough memory for a Patronus. But offensive spells, really? Diffindo was supposed to be a _second-year_ spell.

If the problem was just advanced spells in general, I would have just taken it as evidence for the fanon Magical Core theory. That wasn't the root of my issue, though – after a few months I could cast a passable-looking shield charm (even if I didn't know how it would fare in a real duel), which if I recalled correctly was at least OWL-level material. My wand still remained stubbornly cold for theoretically easier spells.

It was an unpleasant puzzle to which I had no answer apart from continuing to practice and hoping my luck changed.

(At least I could proudly say that I mastered most of the utility spells I could recall. Had I been born anyone else, that would be plenty. As it was, I'd have to either undo this block somehow or get _really_ creative with the ones I knew.)

Life at the Dursley household fell quickly fell into a routine.

Mornings would start out with Petunia gently waking me and Dudley up, turning the light on low and crooning about another day with her darlings.

(She alternated on who she woke up first to prevent any 'hurt feelings.')

Then, I'd come downstairs to a long sit-down breakfast with the whole family. Vernon would read the paper and talk about work, Petunia would talk about the latest gossip, and Dudley and I would talk about school or friends. Sometimes, Dudley would opt out of family breakfast and instead sit with a bowl of cereal in front of the TV.

After breakfast, I would get ready for school. In the earlier years of elementary school, what I wore was mainly determined by Petunia, who purchased primarily dresses in pink. That, along with the constant "she" in reference to me, were my particular pieces of hell. As I became older, I was able to pitch some of the dresses and replace them with pants, but that still wasn't enough to please me.

When I was dressed, I would apply makeup over my scar to Petunia's satisfaction, then grab my lunchbox and backpack. Petunia would then drive Dudley and me to school, also known as six hours' waste of time.

I easily reached the top of the class and stayed there with very little effort on my part. Dudley ended up on the lower-middle end with an average of C. The rest of the Dursleys paid no heed to this; they were convinced that he was a genius who just didn't test well.

(As someone who _had_ known a genius who didn't test well in my past life, I was skeptical but chose to hold my tongue.)

During recess, Dudley would join up with his friends to punch smaller kids. Some things, it seemed, never changed, and Dudley's tendencies were one of them.

Dudley paid me no mind during this time, so I usually took the opportunity to run off some of my excess energy, which I seemed to have a surprising amount of due to my age. A part of me kind of enjoyed the freedom to run around a playground without anyone judging me for it, even if I found my range of motion limited by dresses and skirts for the first few years of it.

After recess came more class – boring – until the end of the day when Petunia would pick us up.

When we came home, Petunia would make me and Dudley a snack as we settled down in front of the TV to do homework. I say we, but in all honesty it was mostly me doing homework. Dudley usually preferred to take this block of time to either only watch TV or run around the neighborhood with his friends.

As afternoon became evening, Vernon would come home, and we would have dinner together as a family. Sometimes this would be at the dinner table, sometimes in front of the TV.

After dinner came some relative independence. I usually took the opportunity to practice magic or read before bed during these few hours.

Weekends were spent in a variety of ways, from play dates to outings to day trips in other parts of England.

For the holidays, the Dursleys would pick one location and then take a trip there during part of the summer. It usually involved different parts of Europe, but one year I decided to pitch the idea of Disneyland, expanding the destinations to the Americas.

(I wasn't able to enjoy the Disneyland trip. Being there, just a few short hours from where I had once lived, was too overwhelming. The realization that I was so close to home yet a world away brought on such a wave of grief that I could barely focus on the theme park itself.)

All in all, life was pretty mundane. Normal, even.

But then, in the summer of 1989, came the first ripples of the Butterfly Effect.

* * *

 **A/N** : First off, thank you to all the lovely people who took the time to review, follow, or favorite this story.

Quick question: how do all of you feel about a pre-Hogwarts arc? Some people like the development they offer, while others are more interested in getting to Hogwarts, and I'd love to hear where all of you stand on the idea. I also have some doubts about my own capabilities in regards to throwing this arc in, considering that it was entirely unplanned and came to me as I was finishing up the chapter. Your opinions will determine whether the arc is short, long, or cut out entirely.

Shame on me for mostly telling instead of showing and for writing a filler chapter, but there was a lot of setup I needed to get done and I didn't want to drag out eight years in explicit detail. The pacing shouldn't be quite as rushed from now on.

Miscellaneous Notes:

\- St. Grogory is not a typo – this is the canonical name of the primary school in Little Whinging

\- Spell incantations will be italicized when they're being cast, un-italicized when they're being referred to

Finally, there's something I'm not sure I made clear enough in the first chapter's notes, so I'll say it louder for the people in the back: THIS IS NOT MY MAIN FIC. My writing priorities lie elsewhere, so don't expect me to update it like it's my primary focus. There's no outline and no writing schedule, and I don't intend to make them, even if their absence has a negative effect on the speed of my writing. I'm doing this for fun, dropping a few hundred words when I feel like I need to take a break from real life or from Letters Home. Telling me to update soon doesn't make me write faster; it turns writing into a chore.

Thanks for reading.

-The Thunder Alchemist


	3. Unfortunate Correspondence

The first sign that something was wrong was the persistent _tap-tap-tap_ on my window.

It was around 9:30 at night – late enough to be lights-out for the children in the Dursley household but not yet late enough for me to have fallen asleep.

I sat up in bed, pushing the covers off me and silently summoning my glasses from my bedside table – the one spell I could cast wandlessly. I clambered out of bed, slipping the glasses on my face as I stumbled towards the window where the tapping continued.

After a few steps I was in front of the window, but I lingered there for a moment, trying to peer through the gloom to see what was waiting. My curiosity warred with my common sense – there could be anything out there, after all, and it might not be pleasant.

Curiosity won out, but with a fair dose of caution: I pulled my wand out from under the loose floorboard in my room before going back to the window.

 _What are you gonna do if it's a Death Eater or something,_ Aguamenti _it to death?_ The snide part of my mind remarked, but I forced it down.

Standing on my tiptoes, I undid the latch with one hand while keeping my wand trained on the window with the other.

With a screech, a gigantic _something_ flew into the room, knocking me backwards and my wand out of my hand. I desperately fumbled for my wand, sloppily palming it before looking up into a pair of bright yellow eyes.

I let out a sigh of relief upon realizing it was just an owl. I pulled myself to my feet and set my wand down on my bed before turning back to get a better look at it: absolutely enormous, with light brown feathers, ear tufts sticking up, and huge yellow eyes. It gave me a – was that expectant? Could owls be expectant? – look as it thrust its leg out towards me, drawing my attention to the roll of parchment tied there.

An owl had come to my window bearing a letter. What the hell? Harry hadn't received any contact from the Wizarding World until he was nearly 11. Why was I getting a letter almost a year early? This was a surprise, and not in a good way.

Since the death of the Potters I had resolved to try to keep things predictable for as long as possible. After all, the last time something happened that I didn't expect, two people ended up dead and I accidently blew my cover to a mass murderer who was already out to get me. I may have reconciled myself to the inevitability of a changing timeline after a few years at Hogwarts – even if I did my best to mimic Harry, I'd never be perfect, and my plan was never to follow his footsteps exactly – but before Hogwarts? Dangerous. Here, I didn't know any of the variables.

 _You don't know this letter didn't come in canon,_ I tried to reassure myself. _Harry was in the cupboard at this time. For all you know, this same letter did get sent, but it was intercepted by his aunt or uncle before it ever reached Harry._

Restraining my worries until I could see what exactly I got, I hesitantly grabbed the parchment as the owl waited with a long-suffering gaze. As soon as I had taken it, the owl settled on the windowsill to watch me impatiently. Waiting for a reply, probably.

I plopped down on my bed, absentmindedly picking up my wand and twirling it in my left hand, before beginning to read.

 _Lizzy Potter_

 _Wherever She May Be_

 _Dear Miss Potter,_

 _I apologize for writing you out of nowhere, but I want to thank you for saving us all from He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named years ago, and we honor your family's sacrifice every year._

 _My daughter Beth, whom I named after you, is turning five next month and she asked me to invite you to her birthday party. It would mean the world to us if you could attend, but I understand that as the Girl-Who-Lived you must be very busy._

 _The party will be July 12_ _th_ _, 1989 from noon to three o' clock. Assuming that you are able to attend, our floo address is Warner Cottage, Dartford, Kent. You wouldn't need to bring a gift; your presence would be more than enough. Even if you can't make it, a few words from you would be enough to bring a smile to her face._

 _I eagerly await your reply._

 _Sincerely,_

 _Christina Warner_

I nearly laughed out loud in relief. It was just a birthday party, nothing malicious in the slightest. Yet despite that, I couldn't rid myself of the hint of uneasiness lurking in the back of my mind.

There was no way this happened in canon. Rowling would have dropped at least some mention of Harry getting contacted by the Wizarding World, but he remained isolated from it until his Hogwarts letters began arriving.

I couldn't see any obvious trigger for this, either. July 2nd, 1989 – nothing unusual about that date, and it wasn't like the letter was anything special either.

Pulling out a sheet of lined paper from the desk in my room, I began to draft a reply.

 _Dear Mrs Warner,_

 _I am currently living with Muggles unaware of my identity for security reasons, so I am regretfully unable to attend your daughter's birthday party. Please tell Beth happy birthday for me, and that I would have loved to be there._

 _Best wishes,_

 _Liz Potter_

I did my best job on the signature, writing lightly and erasing it multiple times until I could get it in cursive that at least sort of resembled my last life's style. It wasn't perfect, of course, but it looked at least passable for a supposed eight-year-old.

(The name I signed with was deliberate. Clearly, Godawful Nickname Number One had caught on, and that wouldn't do, but no way was I going to make first contact using the name Leo.)

Hopefully I hadn't accidentally said anything offensive, but as there was no second set of eyes to look it over save the bird in the corner, it would have to do. I walked over to the owl, which stuck out its leg as I approached, and tied the letter as best as I could.

(The knot holding Warner's letter was elaborate, and I knew there was no way I could replicate it. I took one look at my shoddy bow and decided it was close enough.)

With a final baleful glance, the owl flew away, and I closed the window behind it, sighing as I made my way back to bed.

Over the next few weeks, I began to receive a steady stream of letters – a Gringotts bank statement, Quidditch tickets from various teams, a notification from the Spanish Ministry of Magic of the death of a distant cousin on my father's side.

(I was actually pretty happy to see the Gringotts bank statement, since it helped me clear out a few things between canon and fanon: that Harry's vault was just a trust vault and not the main family vault, and that nobody had been taking funds from my account. In fact, I was actually making money, due to a few investments James had made that were flourishing. Unfortunately, I had no way of knowing if what I owned was a measly sum or a small fortune; the galleon-to-pound conversion had been lost in the recesses of my mind.

The death notification came as a complete surprise. As far as canon was concerned, Harry had no living relatives, but I supposed it made sense for there to be others he didn't know about. Dumbledore never would have placed him with Francisca Potter considering she was from his father's side, and the old man might not have been aware of her existence, considering she lived out of the country. Even if Harry looked for living relatives later on his own, she would have been long dead.)

When July 31st rolled around, I received no less than several hundred letters wishing me a happy birthday, as well as a pile of gifts from wizards to go along with my 30 from the Dursleys, which I went to great pains to conceal.

That sealed the deal: somehow, the owl ward that was implied in canon had fallen.

(Not that I minded the gifts. They were way better than any of the Muggle things I had gotten this year, I received a variety of magical candies and several goods from Zonko's, which I knew I wouldn't be getting any use out of until Hogwarts, if at all.

An unsigned admirer with a sense of humor even sent me the latest _Adventures of Lizzy Potter_ kids' book; I resolved to look into the series when I made it into the Wizarding World for the sake of royalties. I wondered if in previous years he had sent me the earlier books in the series, but there was no way I'd ever know, and there was no return address for me to write back to.)

Summer ended, and it was back to school for me. While classwork was slightly harder to the eyes of nine-year-olds, in a few years I'd be thirty. And so, September and October passed by rather quietly. Every few weeks I'd receive a letter or two from the Wizarding World, which I'd reply to with all the appropriate courtesy. I usually declined whatever offers I received, citing that I was currently living incognito with Muggles and was thus unable to accept.

The morning and afternoon of Tuesday, October 31st passed without event. It wasn't until I got home that my day was shaken up.

As I opened the door to my room, I gasped as I caught site of a massive pile of letters next to my bed, almost two feet tall and twice as wide.

"Would you like me to bring you a snack, Sweetums?" Petunia called from downstairs.

"No thank you, Mum," I called back, trying to make my voice sound as normal as possible. "I have a maths quiz tomorrow I wanna study for."

 _Hopefully that will keep her away for a while_ , I thought as I moved the first handful of letters from the floor to my desk.

I used Voldemort's wand – _mine now_ , I reminded myself smugly – as a letter opener as I made my way slowly through the pile.

Most of them were the same: _thank you for saving us, sorry for your loss_ , that kind of thing. I tried to crush my guilt at the Potters' deaths as I penned cordial responses to all of them.

(My hand shook a little more than usual as I wrote, and a few pieces of paper had mysterious wet spots in the corner, but I pretended not to notice and hoped the recipients would ignore that.)

Be it from luck or magic or maybe even destiny, my letter-writing session went uninterrupted, and finally every reply was finished. I pushed everything under my bed – both the trash from what I'd received plus the letters I'd written. The first pile I would sneak out and burn to keep people from discovering them, while the second pile would be snuck to the post office, which somehow still managed to deliver letters to the Wizarding World. I stretched my aching wrist before closing the window and then making my way downstairs for a snack and a break.

When I came back, munching on an apple, there was a single piece of parchment sitting on my desk that most certainly had _not_ been there when I left.

 _Huh,_ I thought, _I guess an owl snuck in while I was gone._

I crossed the room to my desk and unrolled the parchment.

 _Soon you'll be following your parents into the grave._

And below that, a rough drawing of a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth - the Dark Mark.

Shaken, I set the parchment back down on my desk and fell down onto my bed, taking a moment to process what I just received.

A death threat.

 _Should have expected one of those soon enough,_ I thought to myself as I stared at the ceiling.

But what did I do about it?

I'd never gotten anything like this in my first life, but I knew official procedure if any famous person were to receive a threat in their own home was to call the cops, since there was a real chance it could be serious.

I didn't know what I should do about it here. As far as I knew there was no number to call the Aurors to report it and I didn't have a fast, reliable way of contacting anyone in the Wizarding World. I could ignore it - Dumbledore definitely had wards up around the house itself, but I didn't know if they applied to Little Whinging. Could I go to school and still be protected? I disregarded telling Petunia and Vernon as soon as the thought crossed my mind; it would completely and irrevocably break my cover.

 _Should I leave Privet Drive and make a run for the Wizarding World?_ I considered this option. Sure, it would give me some more freedom of movement, and I'd have the protection of the Ministry of Magic when I made it there, but did I really want to sleep under bridges, eat from dumpsters, and risk being caught in the open until I made it to the safety of Diagon Alley?

The cons stacked up, one after another. Nobody would just let a nine-year-old wander around, and I didn't trust my limited magic to keep people from noticing me; I couldn't remember the street the Leaky Cauldron was on; the goblins might not let me into my vault without the key; there was no guarantee that my leaving would keep the Dursleys safe; and perhaps most importantly, I wouldn't have the safety of blood wards.

I'd have to keep my wand on me at all times, but the only real conclusion was to stay with the Dursleys.

 _Sure, it's not quite home, but—_

And then the reality of my thoughts sunk in.

 _Not quite home, but…_

 _not_

 _quite_

 _ **home.**_

(My blood ran cold, and I looked at the window – closed, just as I'd left it. An owl wouldn't have closed the window on its way out.)

Paranoia took over as I sprang into action, dumping my schoolbooks out of my backpack, grabbing spare clothes, pulling my wand and anything that looked useful from my stash of wizard stuff, emptying my piggy bank, while my thoughts ran a chorus of _stupid, Leo, so stupid_ and I cursed any god I could name that Rowling hadn't included the incantation for expansion charms in the books.

And underlying all that, the panic and desperation of knowing that I was _no longer safe._

Because if the blood wards weren't down already, they were now. That letter could be much more than just an idle threat.

Especially considering the fact that someone had been in my room - you didn't break into a house to leave a fake death threat. _._

 _And what if the writer is_ _ **still outside**_ _?_

I needed to get out now. Petunia and Dudley were downstairs, Vernon would be home within a few hours. Every moment I stayed in this house was another moment the Death Eater could decide that waiting for whatever reason wasn't worth the trouble. My mere presence put them at risk.

If I ran away, I could try to defend myself with magic without having to worry about my family, and if nothing else, he'd kill me and decide the Dursleys weren't worth the effort. Better that I die alone over taking them all with me.

I slung my backpack over my shoulder, heart still pounding, and focused on taking deep breaths for a few seconds. If I looked too panicked Petunia would want to know what was wrong.

I left my room and went down the stairs, taking care to keep at normal walking pace.

"Mum, I'm going to Mary's house," I called, trying to keep my voice from shaking. "I should be back in a few hours."

"Of course, Sweetums," I heard Petunia reply from by the TV, in the same higher-pitched voice she always used when talking to me or Dudley. "Will you be back for dinner?"

"Erm, I don't think so," I improvised, shifting my weight between my feet by the front door and wishing I could just go. "I'll borrow their phone and ring if I'm coming home earlier."

"Have fun and don't stay out too late!"

I took that as my cue to leave, barely able to keep from slamming the door on my way out.

As I briskly walked down the street (forcing myself not to run), I was on high alert, eyes shifting back and forth for anything unusual as I moved my wand from my bag to my left sleeve, where I could grab it more easily. All the while, my mind was in overdrive trying to keep my plan straight and keep myself from outright panicking.

My intention was to get to the train station as fast as possible (15 minutes by car, who knew how long it would take walking), and hop on the first train I could find to London (another hour and a half, assuming I could get on a train immediately). From London, I would try to get to the Leaky Cauldron. I didn't remember the street name, only that it started with a T, so I would either get a map and head to any T street that sounded familiar, check for any other magical platforms at King's Cross (I vaguely remembered something about other fraction platforms from the books, and hoped if I went this path that I wouldn't slam violently into a barrier), or if it came down to it attempt to summon the Knight Bus.

It was a little before 3:00 PM right now; assuming ideal transportation times, I'd make it to London in the early evening, and would hopefully make it to the Leaky Cauldron before dark. I had never been to London alone before, and I didn't trust my own skills enough to feel safe hunting for a little pub in the middle of the night looking like a very vulnerable little girl.

In my bag were three galleons and a handful of sickles - birthday presents from strangers - which was hopefully enough to get me a meal and a room if I made it to the Leaky Cauldron. I wasn't sure what I would do after that; I figured I'd have enough time just getting there to find out.

(Assuming, of course, that I encountered no pitfalls such as the Dursleys realizing I was missing too soon and calling the cops, someone at any of numerous train stations becoming too suspicious of a 9-year-old girl on her own, getting lost in London and having to sleep in an alley, or being hunted down and murdered by a vengeful Death Eater.)

The walk to the station was longer than I thought it would be, made even more stressful by the fact that I was glancing over my shoulder every few seconds and tightly grasping the tip of my wand poking out of my sleeve.

( _A Death Eater isn't going to attack you in broad daylight,_ I silently chastised myself, but continued to keep my eyes peeled.)

The train station was crowded for a Tuesday afternoon - probably full of commuters going home to or coming home from London - and I allowed myself to relax a little. No wizard would risk attacking me in a busy station full of muggles. There was a row of counters to buy tickets, and I stepped into the shortest line I saw.

When I made it to the front, I went up to the counter, steeling myself for my first hurdle: social interaction. The cashier was a plump middle-aged woman in bright red lipstick with a nametag reading Frances, and I instantly pegged her as the type to get suspicious over a nine-year-old traveling alone.

"A ticket for the next train to London, please," I asked in my most serious I'm-an-adult voice, internally cringing at how high my voice was and the fact that I had to stand on my tiptoes to look over the counter.

The woman didn't reply for a moment, instead narrowing her eyes at the sight of a little girl in a Princess Bride shirt and bright pink jeans ordering a ticket alone.

"Where are your parents, sweetie?" she instead asked in that singsong voice people use talking to children, giving me a concerned look.

(As I struggled to think of a plausible excuse without waiting too long to reply, a quiet part of my mind piped up, _Petunia would be concerned, too_. I shoved down my guilt at leaving as quickly as I could. _Thinking about that right now isn't productive. Running away will help them, too. Save the guilt for later._ )

The man behind me in line quickly stepped up to the counter next to me, interrupting my thoughts. "I'm sorry about my daughter, ma'am," he explained. "She wanted to buy her own ticket like a grown-up. I hope it's not too much trouble."

I glanced up in shock at my sudden, strange savior.

As he paid and the cashier made noises about how precious I was, I took a hard look at the man. He was tall and blond, athletic-looking and dressed casually in a blue hoodie and jeans. I guessed he was about 30 - old enough that he could reasonably have a young daughter, but young enough that he'd get ribbing from his friends about settling down so early.

He glanced down at me, and noticing my stare, gave me a conspiratorial wink and a grin. I managed a half smile back at him, not dropping my suspicion. Why was he doing this? Had I encountered a pedophile or something?

The cashier handed him the tickets, and he grabbed my hand, letting out a "Let's head to the platform now, Beth," for the sake of performance, and I let him pull me along a little towards the trains.

Once we were out of sight of the cashiers, I tugged on his hand to get his attention and he let me lead towards a bench. He finally let me go, and I took my opportunity.

"Why did you cover for me at the counter?" I carefully questioned.

He sat down on the bench, resting his arms on his knees casually.

"You look like a smart young lass, and I'm sure you have a good reason for going to London on your own. Even if you don't, a bit of adventure never hurt anyone - I certainly got into my own fair share of trouble as a kid. Just promise me you'll find a constable if you get lost, and that you've got a place to stay after dark."

I took an instant too long to nod my agreement, but my slip was covered by a timely announcement about the London train leaving soon.

"I suppose that's our cue to go, isn't it?" he remarked as he stood up and stretched.

We walked to the train together, then parted ways to find our own spots. I settled in one of those uncomfortable seats with ugly patterning typical to public transportation as the train filled up. The ride to London would be another hour and a half, but I felt prepared, galvanized by my lucky break with a stranger in the train station. Nobody had tried to kill me yet, and I allowed myself to relax a little.

Clearly, this was a sign of good things to come.

* * *

 **A/N:** At long last, an update. No ETA on the next chapter - I posted this one as soon as I finished writing it, so the next one will be out when it's out. The first half of the chapter was written last year, and the second half in the past week, so if there appears to be a noticeable shift in the writing style, that'd be it.

I had intended to get farther in this one chapter, but I hit 4k words and realized this would run way too long if I wrote to the point I wanted the chapter to reach, and noticed I had a pretty good cut-off point with the train to London. Expect some more excitement in the next one, whenever I get to it.

Apologies for my complete lack of knowledge on the British transportation system. I researched what I could in terms of travel times and such, but I don't have the faintest clue how it compares to U.S. subways in terms of appearance and function. I made the guess at buying tickets face-to-face rather than full automation since this is 1989.

Thank you all for reading and for the kind words of support!

-The Thunder Alchemist


	4. Rowle Call

The sun had already set by the time the train reached London, and I belatedly realized I'd forgotten to account for the end of Daylight Savings Time a few days back when trying to estimate how much daylight I had left.

The sky was painted in red, orange, and violet as I stepped out of the train station and registered the rapidly fading daylight.

 _Well, shit. Guess I'm not getting to the Leaky Cauldron before dark._

At least it was only a bit after 5:00 PM. The streets of London were still crowded, and probably would be well into the night considering it was Halloween. I'd have the chance to escape into the crowd if I encountered trouble of either the magical or regular variety.

I grabbed a map of London from a nearby stand of tourist brochures, and sat down on a nearby bench under a streetlight to try to plot my course. I was pretty sure that the entrance to Diagon Alley was in the center-North section of London, based on vague recollections of the first book, but had no way of proving or disproving that hypothesis until I actually found the place. It was all I had to work with for now, though, so I focused my attention on the center area of the map and kept my eyes peeled for something familiar.

Within only a few minutes, something had caught my eye: a station for the Underground, Tottenham Court Road. The instant I saw it I knew I recognized the name. This had to be it.

I didn't want to risk taking the Underground, though, not at this hour. A nine-year-old traveling at night would be much more conspicuous than at 3 in the afternoon, and I doubted I'd be lucky with the assistance of a friendly stranger twice.

(Not that a nine-year-old in a bright pink backpack with a giant map walking the streets of London alone after dark wasn't cause for concern, just that it was less likely I'd get stopped on the streets, and I felt like there was less chance I'd get snatched by a creeper.)

As I made my way through the early evening crowds towards my destination, I couldn't help but let my thoughts wander.

 _They've certainly realized you're gone by now,_ I reflected guiltily.

Petunia would be worried sick; she'd probably phoned all the neighbors already, and the local police would be next. They'd probably search Little Whinging first, at least. If I was lucky the woman at the counter at the train station would have already gone home, and wouldn't be around to tell them she'd seen me. I burned with shame when I realized that the man who helped me would probably end up caught in the line of fire; he might end up branded a child snatcher, and I knew even if the police found me within an hour unharmed my adoptive parents wouldn't hesitate to find a way to press charges against anyone even partially responsible.

I resolved to borrow an owl and send a letter as soon as I reached the Leaky Cauldron. It probably wouldn't arrive in time to prevent a sleepless night for Vernon and Petunia, but they would at least be reassured of my safety in the morning. I wasn't looking forward to writing this letter; telling my adoptive parents that I was really their niece and a wizard felt like something that should be told in person, no matter how much more painful that would make it.

I'd also have to send a letter to Dumbledore, I realized uncomfortably. I didn't know how exactly the wards would read my runner, and I wanted to make sure that even if the blood wards were down that I could get decent enough protections in place to allow me to return. As much as I hated having to be a nine-year-old, was it really my right to take the Dursleys' daughter away from them? I'd cumulatively lived twenty-seven years in normal society, I could afford to live another two. It wasn't like I could start Hogwarts at nine, anyways.

I reached Tottenham Court Road in maybe forty-five minutes, and took a good look at the street I'd be surveying. It was wide and long, lined with shops on either side, and I figured it would be best to concentrate only on one side of the street at a time to make sure I didn't miss the Leaky Cauldron.

I walked the full length of the street, then back down on the other side.

Nothing. No Leaky Cauldron.

I started my third pass. Maybe I had just missed the pub. It was dark, after all, and the Leaky Cauldron probably wasn't the kind of place to have a lit sign.

Halfway down the street, it started drizzling. I pressed myself up towards the sides of the buildings, but not all of them had awnings, and it wasn't long before I was soaking wet.

I swore at the sky. Was there something I had to do to make the pub appear? Or had I wasted my time on the wrong street?

In the spirit of finishing my search, I made it to the top of the street and started on my way back down, even though I felt absolutely miserable. I was cold, I was wet, I was hungry, I was tired, and I was lost. It had been warmer during the day, so I didn't have more than a light jacket, I hadn't eaten anything since that apple before I left Privet Drive, and I could barely see anymore with the raindrops hitting my glasses.

It was completely dark by now, too. I didn't know what time it was, but most of the shops along Tottenham Court Road had closed their doors, and I was starting to become very concerned about the real possibility that I would have to sleep in an alley behind a dumpster.

As I made my way slowly back to where I began, I noticed a shop I hadn't paid any attention to on my last pass: a dumpy little Italian-themed cafe, notable for the fact that it was one of the very few still open at this hour.

I stopped under the awning, pressing my face against the window as much as I could without disturbing my glasses to peer inside. There were still a few patrons in the cafe, sitting in booths. The waitress was lounging on a stool against the counter, legs crossed, chewing gum, and reading The Sun.

A shabby little late-night cafe.

This lit up a long-forgotten memory, and with a growing sense of horror I stepped away from the window. I knew this place, I knew why Tottenham Court Road was familiar. This was where the Golden Trio had gone after Fleur's wedding. Putting my face in my hands, I let out a groan of frustration. The Leaky Cauldron could be on the other side of London for all I knew, and I had wasted hours on a meaningless little coffee shop.

I took off my backpack, balancing it between my legs and the outside wall of the shop to keep it from dropping into a puddle as I pulled my map out. It was damp, and as soon as I unfolded it I saw that the ink had run on a significant number of street names. Trying to find another promising street would be near-impossible.

By memory, I was able to make a vague approximation of where Tottenham Court Road was on the map. There was a green area - a park, probably, though the name had blurred out - only a block or two away, and I figured that was as good a place as any to stop and think. As much as I wanted to go into the cafe and get something to eat, I knew that someone would probably immediately call to report a lost child.

(Though at this point, I was starting to think that maybe giving up on the whole thing was the way to go, but I couldn't shake the fear that there were still Death Eaters staking out Little Whinging. Pushed immediately out of my mind was the little voice whispering that maybe there wouldn't be a Number 4 Privet Drive to even go back to; I didn't want to even think about that possibility.)

I trudged towards the park, wondering if it would be safer to sleep in an alley or in a bush. It had stopped raining, at least, but I was still soaking wet and shivering, and I wished I knew the incantation for a Drying Charm.

The park was small and clean. Green grass, some trees and bushes scattered around, a few flowerbeds, a small pond. There were a few lamps scattered around, but it was for the most part dark. It didn't look like anyone else was spending the night here, and when I spotted a bench under a tree that didn't look as wet as it could have been, I figured it was as good a place as any to camp out. Shame I hadn't found myself a meal, too.

It was pure instinct that sent me off the bench and to the ground as a bolt of bright green light sailed over my head.

I stood, my heart suddenly pounding, to get a look at my attacker.

He faded into view near instantly, under a lamp a good 10 meters away, and I realized he must have been under a Disillusionment spell. Tall, blond, wearing a blue hoodie: the man from the train station. This time, rather than wearing a reassuring smile, he had a near-murderous grin with a wand pointing straight towards me.

It was at this point that I realized how monumentally stupid I had been hours before. Too caught up in my blessing in disguise, I had failed to notice how immensely suspicious it was for a random stranger to help a little girl run away from home. He had seemed so genuine, too, and I was beating myself up for not noticing anything. Just because I was a few times the age I looked, didn't mean Stranger Danger shouldn't have applied. As soon as he said anything to me I should have screamed, should have begged the lady at the counter for help, should have gone straight back to Privet Drive. But I hadn't; I'd still been caught in my state of panic, and my desperation to keep myself and my family safe had ruined everything. Were the Dursleys even alive, or had he cut them down in cold blood the moment I was gone?

I couldn't let myself think about them too much now, though. At the moment, the main question was fight or flight. All my instincts were screaming at me to run, but then I'd just be an easy target moving in a straight line with no chance to block or avoid another spell. This would be where I made a stand, then, no matter how much I wished I hadn't made it into this situation in the first place.

I stood, letting my backpack fall to the ground and then kicking it under the bench before taking a few steps to the right onto the still-wet grass. I needed as much freedom of movement as possible to be able to dodge; at least I was a small target. I also pulled my wand from my sleeve, where it had rested uncomfortably all day, and I was infinitely glad I had resisted the urge to move it to my backpack when I was convinced that no Death Eaters would have followed me to London.

With luck, the Ministry of Magic would have detected a Killing Curse being fired off in a Muggle area, and Aurors would be on the way. In this case, what I needed to do was stall for as much time possible to stay alive before I got backup. If the Death Eater started monologuing, I'd want to keep him talking for as long as possible.

The other possibility was that one curse wasn't enough to set off the Ministry alarms, which was the much scarier thought. I had no way of knowing how magic was tracked - if Unforgivables were watched, if an adult casting magic near me would trigger a warning, or if I'd have to cast spells myself to set off the Trace, or if my stolen wand meant there was no tracking on me at all. If this was the case, then I'd be on my own. Instead of stalling, I'd have to try to make as much of a stink as possible. If one Unforgivable wouldn't send them running, I'd have to cast more spells to get the alarms going. If no Aurors were on the way at all, I could at least get Obliviators on scene (who could then bring Aurors) by drawing Muggle attention.

If Aurors were on the way, I'd want to keep him talking to minimize the risk to myself. If they weren't, I'd want to get a duel going to keep him from quietly being able to finish me off at the end of a monologue.

Did I trust my luck with the Aurors? No.

But did I trust my magical ability enough to beat a Death Eater, especially when I was incapable of casting most of my range of dueling spells? Hell no.

Another Killing Curse interrupted my thoughts, and I dropped to the ground again to avoid it. I picked myself up, panting a little from the physical exertion while I was basically running on fumes, and looked at the Death Eater again.

He was panting a bit, too; I knew Avada Kedavra wasn't an easy spell to cast, and I hoped those two missed ones had tired him out a bit. Might give me a bit more of a chance. Either way, I doubted he'd be likely to just chuck another spell at me straight-on since I'd avoided the last two.

I decided to venture a question: "How did you find me?"

Getting him talking was probably the best way to stall for time - while I couldn't be sure that help was on the way, a second Killing Curse was probably more likely to draw attention than the first, and even if it didn't, a conversation would give me a minute or two to recover.

"Tracking charm," he replied shortly. Not one for words, then.

I didn't want to have to dodge any more spells unless it was entirely necessary, and as the adrenaline pumped through me I barely managed to remember that I still had a wand in my hand, that I could cast a Shield Charm. I tried to run through the other spells I knew, but everything else I could think of that might be useful wasn't something I was able to cast.

(Dropping down and then jumping up like I was to avoid spells was kind of like doing burpees in P.E. all those years ago in my first life, except worse because if I fucked them up I'd be dead. I could almost imagine how my old coach would yell at me for not doing a set of 30 fast enough.)

That was when the real duel began.

He shot three bolts of light at me wordlessly in quick succession - dark indigo, pale red, cerulean - all aimed at different points to keep me from dodging. With a yelled "Protego!" I formed my first shield. It looked to have all the strength of a soap bubble, but miraculously it held through two of the spells before popping.

The third spell, however, flew unhindered. I jumped to the right to avoid the spell, which was aimed low, but it was a little too late. The light grazed my left leg, and I immediately grabbed my shin in pain. It felt someone had slammed a metal bar into my leg, and I didn't want to think about what would've happened if I'd taken this straight to the chest after dropping down to dodge one of the other spells.

I barely managed to get my wand back up to block another spell - this one a sickly orange that I absolutely did not want to hit me. This shield, however, was much weaker than the last, and the spell sailed right through to strike me straight in the abdomen.

Instantly, I was down on my knees with the worst nausea I'd experienced in either of my two lives, and it was all I could do to not start dry heaving right there.

This was when I realized I needed to get on the offensive, somehow, and fast. My shields weren't strong enough to block the nastier spells the Death Eater was throwing, and I didn't trust my ability to dodge quickly any more in the state I was in. Unless I could take control of the battle, I'd be dead in the next few spells. The problem was that just about anything that could really help - stunners, Cutting and Blasting curses, even the Unforgivables if it really came down to it - wasn't within my ability to cast.

What did I have that was basic enough that I could use it, but versatile enough that I could still apply it to a real duel?

 _Accio shoes._

The Death Eater was in the middle of casting his own spell right as I set off mine, and his shot harmlessly into the sky as he was suddenly yanked towards me by his feet.

As he came close to me, I pitched myself to the side as much as I could given my current physical state in the hopes of pulling his feet that way and getting his head to hit the leg of the bench to my left. It worked; his head collided with the bench, making a loud _clang_. I wasn't able to get far enough away, though, and ended up with a foot hitting my stomach.

The man let out a low groan, and I used the break in the fight to drag myself by my hands and knees a few feet away and empty the few remaining contents of my stomach onto the grass.

(It didn't make me feel any better; it only made my mouth taste worse.)

Slowly, I pushed myself up, shakily getting onto my knees and from there, to my feet. The Death Eater was still recovering, but I wasn't in much state to capitalize on that, especially considering I had no real access to any spells that would let me decisively finish the duel. My only hope was that I was recovered enough to get away before he was recovered enough to come after me.

(Best case scenario: Aurors popped in right now. That would be nice.)

As the Death Eater began to recover, I stumbled away so that the streetlight was at my back rather than in front of me, essentially trading positions with him. I had hoped that forcing him to look into the light would reduce his visibility and worsen his aim, but the instant I stepped into the light I realized I was wrong. Rather than helping, the light now surrounding me was instead making it harder for me to see into the dark, where the man was slowly pushing himself to his feet using the bench behind him as support.

It was too late to move back now, though. My leg throbbed and my stomach was rolling, my muscles ached from all the jumping around, and I felt drained even though I'd barely used any spells. I was losing from attrition, and one way or another this fight would have to end soon.

I saw the next spell flying at me too late, and it hit my right arm as I raised it to try to get another shield up. This one felt like a peeling sunburn, as if I'd spent all of the past day at the beach in hundred-degree weather without any sunblock, and I was pretty sure the curse would've cut straight through my shield even if I'd managed to cast one. I bit back an exclamation of pain at the feeling of my wand pressing against the now-burning flesh of my right hand, and was forced to swap it to my left where my grip was much less steady, both in general and as a result of the pain I was in.

Gathering up as much of my remaining strength as I could, I prepared to cast as bright of a Lumos as possible. Someone had to be close by, and even if I was entirely alone, if I could blind the Death Eater for at least a moment I'd have the chance to try an _expelliarmus_. Disarming him and following up with an _incarcerus_ would give me the win.

I closed my eyes and let out a yell of "Lumos!". Even through my closed eyelids, I could tell that the flash of red was surprisingly bright, and when I opened my eyes I saw the Death Eater covering his eyes in pain. Not wanting to lose the moment, I quickly shot the Disarming Charm his way with a shout of triumph.

It missed.

I fell to my knees, exhausted, as the last of the adrenaline that was keeping me going faded away. So that was it, then. Dead at the age of nine due to inability to aim with left hand. I wondered if someone was going to write that on my gravestone.

(Voices began to shout somewhere in the distance.)

My opponent straightened up, rubbing his eyes one last time before making his way towards me slowly and deliberately, as if to draw out the moment of my defeat.

(I'm sorry to say it worked; seeing him walk at me with the intention to kill as I could do absolutely nothing about it was probably the longest, most miserable moment of my life.)

As he reached me, he spat at me then slapped me hard, knocking my glasses off and sending my world into a blur as I went from my knees to the ground.

"Dumb bitch," he muttered. "Couldn't just lay down and fuckin' die from the start."

He pointed his wand straight at my face and spoke clearly: "Avada Kedavra."

The last thing I saw before the green light hit me was three jets of red meeting their mark in his side.

* * *

A/N: In Draft 1, Leo almost really did make it to the Leaky Cauldron. However, he messed up on the street name because I messed up on the street name. My policy for writing so far has been that if I can't remember a book detail, Leo isn't allowed to remember it (unless it's absolutely critical to the plot.) So, I'd written out a nice scene where he made it within sight of the Leaky Cauldron, but when I searched it up on the Harry Potter wiki to see which stores the pub sat between, I saw that it was on Charing Cross instead of Tottenham Court. Oops?

I really hope the fight scene went alright. I haven't written one before, so I was mostly just following my outline and hoping for the best. (By the way, outlining the specific steps in the fight rather than just winging it from "They fight" in my main outline was probably the best writing decision I've made so far - made putting the whole thing down on paper much easier knowing what moment would come when.) In terms of feedback: Too much detail? Not enough? Did it flow well? Were both parties involved behaving realistically? I don't have a second set of eyes looking it over before the chapter goes up, so I'd love reviews telling me how I did on it.

By the way, if anyone wants to keep track of how far into the next chapter I am, I'll be putting status updates on my profile related to how many words I've written into it to give a decent idea of how it's going and how soon the next update will be. I'm aiming for one every two weeks or so as a reasonable time frame for me to write four to five thousand words, but they'll vary based on how much writing time I have with my college schedule. (Midterms are next week, for example, which will probably delay the next one.

Thanks for reading!

-The Thunder Alchemist


	5. Setting the Stage

_(The distant scrape of chair legs against the floor.)_

 _(The quiet shuffling of papers, and a man clearing his throat.)_

 _(And then, the music.)_

Somewhere, someone was playing the piano. It was slow and quiet, playing a song I couldn't quite place with a name that was just out of reach.

I came to awareness slowly as the notes began, like I was waking up from a nap that had been a little bit too long - the same groggy, half-asleep state you're in when the alarm goes off too early after you were up too late at night.

I groaned, rolling from my side onto my back and putting a hand over my eyes to keep out the sudden brightness I was seeing from behind my eyelids. The cold linoleum pressed uncomfortably against my back, and I took a moment to marvel at the fact that I was in no pain apart from a sore neck from laying on the ground and feeling like I hadn't had a good night's sleep.

There were three things I realized just before I opened my eyes: one, that I had been hit by a Killing Curse and that there was a reasonable chance I was dead; two, that I had somehow arrived somewhere completely different; and three, as I discovered upon shifting my legs, was that I was now unmistakably male.

It was this third fact that had me fully awake in an instant, springing to my feet to figure out _what the hell is going on_ until the sight of my surroundings had me stopping cold.

I was in an airport, near the boarding gates. I had been laying in the center of the walkway, with rows of seats and gates all around me, and a high domed ceiling above.

If I only had one word to describe the place, it would be eerie. The screens that would normally show departure and arrival info were eerily blank; the terminal was eerily empty; the sky was eerily white; and now that the piano had stopped, it was eerily silent. If not for how bright the whole place was, it would be a scene straight out of a horror movie.

As if summoned by my thoughts that awful instrument began to play again, louder than before, as it seemingly came from both everywhere and nowhere. I spun around to look for the source with a cry of frustration, determined to give the musician a piece of my mind, when I caught sight of a head of dark hair poking up from the back of one of the airport chairs.

I walked towards the figure slowly, uncertainly, my footsteps echoing as they kept time to the haunting tune from the piano. As I came closer, I saw that the figure was a man, and spotted the newspaper in his hands. He casually flipped a page, ignoring my approach.

It wasn't until I was standing right in front of him, looking down from a height much taller than I had become accustomed to, that he looked up from his reading.

Green eyes met mine as he closed the newspaper, holding it up to show me. _The_ _Daily Prophet,_ read the top of the paper, and " **GIRL-WHO-LIVED LIVES AGAIN!"** the cover proclaimed **.**

"Only nine years old and you've already found a way to muck up the timeline," he remarked with a sigh, leaning back into the airport chair and setting the newspaper down in the seat next to him..

Everything clever I'd planned to say vanished from my mind at the sight of the one person I'd never expected to see in this life.

"I thought this was supposed to be King's Cross," I ended up blurting out as the music abruptly stopped.

Because sitting in front of me was Harry Potter.

He shook his head. "Not for you it's not. Would you even be able to tell it from any other train station? You've taken more flights than you have train rides. Now come on, sit down."

I felt incredibly stupid as I realized he had a point, and I could feel my face heating up as I took his invitation to sit down in the airport chair across from him.

"So what's with all this then? I don't have any Hallows. If I'm dead, why didn't I just die?" I tried again, motioning around me as I realized I would have to be the one to take initiative in asking questions.

Harry chuckled, and it sounded just the slightest bit _wrong_. "Things have barely gotten interesting. Why would we end it now when there's so much potential for something new, and there are so many convenient excuses to keep you up?"

Nope. This was not the Harry Potter I knew, and I had the growing suspicion that whoever I was talking to was just wearing his face. If this really was Harry Potter, this wasn't the Harry Potter I was familiar with. This was something much older, much more powerful. Not the Boy-Who-Lived, but the Master of Death, if not Death itself. The collective 'we' also had me concerned. I didn't know what group it could possibly refer to, and I really didn't like surprises involving matters of life and death.

(And if his whole statement wasn't ominous I didn't know what was.)

"Well, it's nice to know my entire existence can be owed to the fact that the folks upstairs were bored. Don't suppose you could give me any pointers, could you? Any ideas on why my wand won't cast half the spells I've got in my head?"

(Taking into account my newfound knowledge or lack thereof about the identity of my conversation partner, it was probably not the best idea to sass whoever I was talking to, but nobody had ever accused me of having the best ideas.)

The man ( _NOT Harry_ , I reminded myself) smiled indulgently, as if talking to a child. "I can assure you that none of us have done anything to the wand in your possession, but why even bother keeping you around if we were just going to hand you all the answers?"

My heart beat a little faster at the mention of the conditions for my ongoing existence, because despite my blasé remarks about being dead I kind of liked being alive. I relaxed a little when the man in front of me moved along.

"By the way, I'm surprised to see you're wearing that face."

Was there something wrong? I stood, turning around to stare at my reflection in the window behind my chair. The face that stared back was a man in his late twenties, tall with light brown hair, a strong jaw, and stubble as if he (I?) hadn't shaved for a day or two.

Was this what I would have looked if I'd lived another nine years and finished transitioning in my first body?

If so, I looked exactly how I should. A thought creeped into my head; did he mean-?

"Are you asking why I'd want to look like Leo instead of Margaret?" I ventured as I sat again, not sure I wanted to know the answer. "Because I don't really get all the mechanics of the 'not-quite-dead' thing and in that case could only offer some philosophical bullshit about the inner self."

A pause.

"Leo has been dead for nearly a decade, Lizzy," he said in a voice that was almost gentle. "Nobody else has been this attached; isn't there a point where it's healthier to let go and get on with your new life?"

Flashback to every awful family reunion where a relative asked in a whisper about my 'phase'; every friend who said they'd start talking to me again once I stopped 'pretending' to be a boy; every hurdle I'd had to jump in my first life to get people to recognize me as trans; everything I'd heard about trans struggles pre-2000s that I'd have to go through again; every doubt and uncertainty about transitioning from Girl-Who-Lived to Boy-Who-Lived.

So what if my new body was female? So was my first, and I didn't even have the benefit of past knowledge back then to realize that something wasn't right. For someone - something - to acknowledge that I had been Leo in my first life, but then discard that identity in the next breath? Why did dying have to change anything?

"If you're going to get technical on me, I've been Margaret Dursley more than Elizabeth Potter, and I've been Leo even longer than that. At least be consistent," was my reply. For a fraction of a second I felt well within my rights to be a smart-ass about this, until I remembered I wasn't talking to just anyone.

 _Please stop sassing people who might have the ability to smite you._

(There were some times when it was okay to fight people on their recognition of your identity, and other times when it was best to smile and nod while silently seething. So far, I was 0 for 2 on keeping my thoughts to myself.)

Thankfully, I didn't seem to have angered him. He was still relaxed, slouching slightly in the airport chair with his legs stretching well into the aisle.

"The time you've had a name means nothing. How much do you know about souls?" asked Not Harry.

"Enough to know that I am and have always been Leo."

(Wrong answer.)

He laughed deeply - not condescendingly, but with real mirth. The sound grated on my ears and it affected me about as much as if he had spat in my face. I clenched my fists and bit my tongue.

"I'm sorry about that," he apologized as he stifled his last few chuckles, not quite sounding sincere. "It's just funny how little you know about your own existence."

"Then _please_ take a moment and explain to me how you can look at the _fully-grown adult male_ standing in front of you and tell me that I'm actually just a confused little girl." I shouted as I stood, fed up with half-answers.

For just a moment the illusion cracked and Harry Potter and the airport and I were gone and instead there was something immense and dark and unfathomable and I knew that he knew every single guess I had for what he was and that I wasn't even close. _Silly mortal,_ echoed through my head and I couldn't tell if the words were mine or not, _how can you comprehend anything if you can't even comprehend yourself?_

But then the world snapped back into place and everything was back as it was before save for a fresh, splitting headache in the front of my brain. The _something_ that looked like Harry Potter hadn't moved an inch, smiling a fake smile, and dread pooled in the pit of my stomach as I realized that pissing this thing off would be a fuck-up on a completely different level from dropping my real name to Voldemort.

I sat back down again, stunned.

"The horcrux in your head has been destroyed; the next Killing Curse that hits you will kill you. Consider this the only help you'll get. You're pretty smart; you'll figure out the rest."

And the world faded.

I shot upright in bed, nearly knocking heads with a woman leaning over me.

"You're awake!" she gasped.

"Wha-?" came my very articulate reply, as I realized I once again had the voice and body of a child.

"Oh, you must be so confused! I'm Healer Farley, you're in St. Mungo's, today's November 3rd, we didn't know if you were going to wake after being hit with that Killing Curse, especially after all the other damage you sustained-"

I couldn't focus on the healer's words, too busy trying to process what had just happened. _How did that one Deathly Hallows quote go… 'is this real or is this happening inside my head?'_ I wasn't sure if that conversation was real or not, but I figured if I were to imagine anything while in a coma it certainly wouldn't be an apparently transphobic (?) cosmic entity of some sort wearing the face of Harry Potter in a horror movie airport. Maybe this was a poor justification, but it felt much too real to be fake. It was better not to take any more risks with Killing Curses though, in any case.

What I needed was the time to sit down with a pen and paper and go through that dream (vision, nightmare, hallucination?) word by word and figure out as much as I could from the limited information I had to try to plan out how this would affect the next ten years of my life, because I was apparently too stupid to avoid snapping at things that were significantly more powerful than me right when something important was about to happen. Or was it important? Could it have been just a figment of my imagination after all? I had a strong feeling that I'd missed some incredibly critical information, but I could barely put that feeling into words with everything swirling through my brain.

I could not organize my thoughts in the middle of St. Mungo's.

I tuned back into what the witch was saying right as she was talking about the hospital's gift policy, unsure how her rambling had even made it to that point.

"Ah, well, I just hope I can be out of bed soon, but you're the expert on dealing with the aftermath of these sorts of things, not me." I cut in with my most innocent voice.

"...You are, actually." cue blank look from me. "You've survived two Killing Curses; technically, _you_ have the most experience with dealing with them. We're just hunting for solutions as we go along," she tittered.

Not what you wanted to hear from a trained medical professional, but I supposed she was right.

 _Out of all the things to be known for._

"Albus Dumbledore wanted to talk to you as soon as you woke up; I'm going to go Floo him now," Healer Farley told me with an artificially bright smile, making for the door.

That… did not sound right.

I cleared my throat. "Um, why does the Headmaster of Hogwarts get to meet with me as soon as I wake up, before my immediate family or even law enforcement, when I was just nearly killed by a dark wizard?"

The witch turned back to face me, giving me a pitying look.

"He's your guardian, dear, don't you remember?"

 _Well, shit. No getting out of this one._

I was definitely not ready to talk to Dumbledore.

Last time I found myself face-to-face with one of the strongest wizards in the world, I spilled the beans about my identity to Voldemort before I was even out of diapers, and not 5 minutes ago I'd annoyed a possibly all-powerful being by getting too defensive about my identity. The full reality of how close I'd come to damning myself was sinking in, ramping my stress levels up to eleven as I thought about talking to the leader of the Light.

For now, though, I'd have to shove my most recent experience to the back of my mind and pretend for a little while that it had never happened, since my future in this world depended on my ability to not give anything else away.

Defending my identity against 'Harry Potter' had been tiring; trying to strike a balance between myself and my alter egos against Dumbledore would be exhausting. Even though I had apparently been in a coma for two days, I wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep.

I knew I couldn't speak to Dumbledore as myself armed with knowledge of the timeline. Not only would that probably set off a million alarm bells in his head as to how I could possibly know things or if I was even telling the truth, I also just straight-up didn't trust him enough for that. I didn't know if I was dealing with a regular Dumbledore or a manipulative Dumbledore or even an evil Dumbledore. It was bad enough that one major player knew I wasn't Lizzy Potter; I couldn't afford to tip off the second, especially when I had absolutely no way of knowing what kind of reaction to expect and no clues as to predicting his actions.

Going all in as either Margaret or Liz was off the table. Following through with just one of them would leave too many holes in my story that couldn't be explained: Margaret wouldn't have any way of knowing anything about magic or Death Eaters or Diagon Alley, while if he cross-referenced with the Dursleys at all he'd know that the identity of 'Liz Potter' just couldn't exist.

I'd have to somehow stick as close to the Margaret Dursley everyone knew as possible while also finding some way of explaining how I ended up in a deadly duel in the middle of London in which I knew enough to not immediately lose.

 _How in the name of all that is holy am I going to create a narrative believable enough to fool Albus Dumbledore?_

(I was almost hoping this Dumbledore was the type to just read my mind. At least then I wouldn't have to bullshit my way through the conversation.)

As I mentally scrambled for ideas, I took a good look at the room I was in. I was fortunate enough to be given a private hospital room, most likely due to being famous and also possibly in a permanent coma. The walls were painted a sunny pale yellow, and I had a window on my left that looked out to an overcast sky.

The stand next to my bed was piled high with various gifts from well-wishers - I noted candy, letters, and trinkets - dwarfing a forlorn-looking potted plant. Balanced on the top of the pile were three copies of the Daily Prophet. I picked them up and, seeing that they were from the past three days, decided to examine the main articles, starting with the one from November 1st.

' **GIRL-WHO-LIVED LIVES AGAIN!** ' read the cover, and I realized with a shock that it was the same one I'd just seen in the Airport of Death. An artist's sketch of a small girl and a hooded man with wands raised towards each other dominated the area below the headline, and figured it was supposed to represent the duel. The article was just the basics: 'Lizzy Potter' involved in a duel with a Death Eater, survives another Killing Curse, Death Eater taken into Ministry custody, 'Lizzy' in St. Mungo's. Enough to give the public a rough idea of what had happened the night of October 31st, 1989 before all the details were out. As soon as it devolved into the reporter's speculations, I set the paper aside.

' **THORFINN ROWLE GIVEN DEMENTOR'S KISS** ' read the second, featuring a mugshot of the man who tried to kill me. My stomach rolled at the words 'dementor's kiss'; I sincerely doubted 36 hours was enough time for a trial by jury or even for the DMLE to get all the facts out of Rowle. Maybe he deserved death - that wasn't for me to decide - but summary execution? I guess Voldemort was down a follower, and Rowle couldn't offer any more evidence contrary to what I'd choose to say. Unsettled, I set this paper aside as well.

' **MINISTER BAGNOLD AT FAULT? EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH** **AUROR PROUDFOOT!** ' read the newspaper from this morning, with a cover picture of a two women, and I was startled to realize that the picture was, in fact, moving. One woman I immediately recognized as Rita Skeeter just by her bearing, the way she leaned in towards the other woman like a vulture circling her prey, nevermind the floating parchment and bright green quill between them. The other woman was identified as Karina Proudfoot, one of the three aurors who arrested Rowle. She looked tense but determined as she responded to a question of Skeeter's.

As soon as I started to read the interview I knew this was going to be a good one. Proudfoot was incredibly clever - she and her team could definitely have become scapegoats for my hospitalization, but she shifted the blame straight onto the Minister herself. According to the auror, Bagnold's 'Right to Party' speech from immediately after Voldemort's defeat, which defended British wizards' risking the Statute of Secrecy following the end of the Wizarding War, caused a pretty big shift in policy for DMLE responses on Halloween nights. Aurors were told to prioritize reports of trouble in wizarding areas over spells being cast in Muggle areas. In fact, a group Aurors was dispatched to break up a bar fight in the Leaky Cauldron before they sent anyone out after me. If not for this policy, Proudfoot argued, they would have made it to that park in London in time to stop that final Killing Curse from being fired.

A plan was beginning to take shape in my mind as I read through the newspaper articles, something that could be just crazy enough to work.

By the time the healer came back to my room, leading in an old man in bright magenta robes, I was ready.

(On a side note, I was utterly unprepared for the sight of Albus Dumbledore. An old dude, with a long white beard going down to his waist, wearing magenta robes with yellow polka dots and half-moon spectacles. As part of my mind screamed _don't underestimate him_ , the other part screamed _he's senile._ )

Dumbledore sat down in the chair next to my bed, and I sat up a little bit straighter. The healer stepped back out of the room with a murmured "call if you need me," and then I was alone with the leader of the Light.

This wasn't going to go like my last conversation; I wouldn't let it. I needed to be completely in control here.

"Excuse me," I said, putting a slightly perplexed look on my face, "They said you were my magical guardian, but I don't know what that is or who you are."

He gave me a slight smile and twinkling blue eyes met mine. I looked away a little faster than was polite, wary of any mind-reading.

"I am Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts - you know of Hogwarts, yes?" he said, and I noted the lack of explanation on magical guardianship. At my nod, he continued, "It is very important that we know what happened on Halloween that led you here."

I took a deep breath, then began to speak. What I provided was a moderately sanitized version of the events that brought me from Little Whinging to St. Mungo's. I saw the death threat and feared for my family's safety since whatever protection was on the house appeared to be gone. I knew it was a magical threat, but had no way of contacting the Wizarding World so I tried to make my way to Diagon Alley. However, I couldn't remember how to find the Leaky Cauldron, allowing the Death Eater to catch up to me. I stood my ground in the duel because Petunia had once mentioned there was some way for the magical government to track spellcasting, and I thought they would show up to help.

(I deliberately left out my encounter with Rowle at the train station how I spent hours going up and down the wrong street, because even thinking about those things made me feel stupid.)

"I've heard your spellcasting was quite impressive for a witch who has yet to begin her education," the old man praised, a twinkle in his eyes.

So that was his angle then. Shields were something like O.W.L. level, summoning was at least a 4th-year spell, and Expelliarmus was probably pretty high up there, too. It probably hadn't escaped Dumbledore that my wand used to be Voldemort's; maybe he was concerned the horcrux had taken over?

"Mum - that is, my aunt Petunia - gave me a box of her sister's things she'd never pitched out after it became clear my magic wouldn't go away and I learned some spells from that. I thought everyone who was raised with magic would be way ahead, was I really that good?" I asked hopefully.

This box didn't exist, but I was ready for when this and the other holes in my story popped up. The story I had chosen to stick with in terms of background was as follows: I never got rid of the letter from Dumbledore, but the Dursleys still adopted me in the hopes of 'stomping out that nonsense' through a normal, healthy childhood. After the accidental magic started, Petunia came clean and gave Lily's magical things that she'd forgotten she had, giving a neat explanation for how I knew magic. If someone tried to cross-reference this with the Dursleys, I'd find a way to suggest Rowle had obliviated them. Rowle couldn't exactly contradict me.

The narrative wasn't perfect - maybe there was some way to tell if someone had been obliviated, or the DMLE had pulled the full story out of Rowle from the moment he left that letter on my desk, or there'd been people checking up on me during my childhood - but it was the best I was able to come up with on such short notice.

After recounting my story, I remembered a certain something that I had _not_ seen in my room. "I had a backpack full of things with me, do you know what happened to it?" I asked worriedly. Most of the items in my bag were replaceable, but it was an indirect way to figure out what happened to the only thing I had that I couldn't bear to lose.

"Your belongings will all be returned to you upon your departure from St. Mungo's, with the exception of your wand."

"Why not?" I made my voice sound petulant to hide my panic.

"How did you across this wand, Lizzy?" Dumbledore inquired gently.

(There was nothing I hated more than people who responded to questions with questions, and this was the one thing I didn't want to explain, even if I'd prepped a response just in case.)

"Mum gave it to me with the box of Lily's things. I figured it was hers," came my reply. I carefully refused to meet his eyes, and hoped my explanation was good enough to escape suspicion.

"I suppose your aunt must not have known, but you aren't allowed a wand until you turn eleven, and magic outside of school is forbidden until you reach your majority. However, the Ministry will be more than happy to return it to you when you receive your Hogwarts letter."

Just because that wand nearly killed me doesn't mean it's not mine, and I was going to fight to keep it.

(I hoped this time that I'd chosen the right battle.)

Taking a deep breath and trying to stay calm, I put together as clean a response as I could: "With all due respect, sir, I would have been much worse off in that fight if I didn't have a wand. Sure I could still dodge those Killing Curses, but there were some nasty-looking curses I was able to block with shields that would have hit me if I'd been caught unarmed. Being immune to an Unforgivable doesn't make me immune to death, and you can't know that something like this won't happen again."

"We will make sure you and your relatives are much better protected in the future," Dumbledore assured me in a tone that left no room for debate. "You won't have any need for a wand until you begin at Hogwarts."

 _Balls._

The Headmaster stood. "I will leave you in the care of the fine healers of St. Mungo's, my girl. Hopefully we can get you back to your relatives in the next few days."

As soon as the door to my room closed, I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.

Maybe I was a bit too verbose and a bit too talented with magic for a nine-year-old, but those were problems I'd encounter later no matter how much I tried to hide them now. Giving off a little bit of a Young Tom Riddle vibe was better than giving off an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe, though, right?

Outwardly, at least, Dumbledore didn't show any signs of disbelief towards my story, so I'd have to take it as a partial victory.

 _There you go, Leo, you survived a full conversation with someone powerful without doing anything monumentally dumb. Make that 1 in 3._

* * *

 **A/N** : We've broken the 20k word mark! Next chapter will make this the longest thing I've ever written. I'm sorry for the delays on this chapter - between midterms, a paper due, and writer's block it was hard to get out, but I think it turned out a decent length with some good content. Capturing Harry's voice became much easier once he stopped being Harry, but Dumbledore was a real challenge. I ended up writing most of the filler between conversations before I wrote the conversations themselves, then edited the filler later, so if there are a few moments that don't quite fit from when Leo wakes up to when Dumbledore walks in that's the reason. I kind of dumped a lot of information in this chapter, so sorry about that.

I think I finally get what people are talking about when they talk about characters writing themselves. He was supposed to just have a nice conversation with Harry Potter à la Deathly Hallows - I'd written out a corresponding author's note and everything - but _no,_ suddenly there was some sort of eldritch abomination involved and Leo, the stubborn turd, was pissing him off and flipping over some well-planned plot points. There are a few incongruities, but I'll get to those in the future. Once Leo gets a break he'll definitely be revisiting the conversation to think about some of the implications for the future.

For those of you looking forward to Hogwarts, we'll probably be getting into canon material by Chapter 10.

Finally, a reminder that you can check on the status of the next chapter by looking at the top of my profile.

Thanks for reading!

-Arameyy, formerly known as The Thunder Alchemist


	6. Dust in the Wind

The first thing I did after Dumbledore left was ask the Healer if I could have something to eat. Whatever sort of nutrient potion they gave me while I was out wasn't enough to make me feel full, and more than anything I just wanted a greasy basket of fish and chips.

(In case you were curious, St. Mungo's does not, in fact, offer fish and chips. I'm not sure Healer Farley even knew what it was.)

After a disappointing meal of lukewarm soup and some bread - to keep from upsetting my stomach, I was informed - a whole host of healers invited themselves into my room to bombard me with questions and give me some answers.

Within an hour, I received a clean bill of health. Apparently Rowle hit me with some pretty nasty Dark magic, but most of the damage was repaired while I was unconscious. I was let out with only a warning not to exert myself and to mind my right hand, which was still a little tender from the spell damage. The healers were still scratching their heads over how I'd survived not one but two Killing Curses, but since none of their diagnostic spells were turning up any side effects they didn't have an excuse to keep me.

As the throng of healers shuffled out of my room, bottlenecked by the door, one stopped to turn back to me.

"An Auror should be up here soon to Apparate you back home; the lobby's too full of reporters to leave the normal way," he warned before heading out.

I had only just finished changing from my hospital gown to regular clothes (they were returned, but I wouldn't have minded losing those magenta jeans) when a knock at the door signalled the arrival of my escort.

"Come in," I called, standing awkwardly next to the bed.

The door opened, and I was greeted by another familiar face I hadn't expected to see.

My Auror escort was very tall and very dark, dressed in a business suit that would not have looked out of place in Muggle London, which was contrasted by the pink backpack that hung from one arm.

Before he even introduced himself I knew his name, and I had to stifle a grin in recognition.

"Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt," he said with a smile, offering a hand. Even though he was much taller than me, he didn't do the condescending crouch I'd seen from so many other adults.

I took his hand, giving as firm a shake I could as a nine-year-old girl. "Liz Potter," I replied, taking the opportunity to present the least offensive of my nicknames.

He released my hand, and slid the backpack off his arm. "I believe this is yours, Ms. Potter," he said, presenting it to me.

Would it be rude to rifle through my belongings to make sure everything was there? Probably. I put the backpack on, hoping that nothing save my wand was missing, and resolved to take inventory as soon as I got home.

"To avoid the crowd in the lobby I'm going to take you directly from here to your Muggle neighborhood. Do you have any experience with Side-Along Apparition?"

I shook my head. The books described it as unpleasant, I recalled, but was pretty sure the main problem was just splinching, which I didn't have to worry about in this case.

"You might feel a little bit sick," he warned. "It's worse as a passenger. Make sure you don't let go of my hand. Are you ready?"

"Yeah. Best to get it over with, I think," I replied. Apparition or not, I was done dealing with wizards for the day. I just wanted to go home, assure my family I was okay (because I doubted anyone from the magical world had bothered to inform them of my whereabouts), and sort out my thoughts in some peace and quiet.

Kingsley took my hand, his grip unrelentingly firm, and with a crack we were gone.

Up and down vanished; I was being pulled a million different directions, I was being turned inside out, I was being crushed. I couldn't breathe. Someone was using a baseball bat to stuff me through a straw in the middle of a whirlpool. Kingsley's hand was my only constant.

It lasted for an instant and an eternity, and then my feet touched down on solid ground as gravity took hold once again.

My landing wasn't a steady one, and I tripped over my own feet, stumbling forward a few steps before finally catching myself. The journey left me feeling incredibly dizzy, and Kingsley graciously allowed me a few minutes to recover.

Once the world stopped spinning, I took stock of my surroundings: we had apparated behind a tree, in an area I recognized as the little park on Wisteria Walk. Privet Drive was just around the block.

I stood up straighter, trying to regain some lost dignity. "Is is always that bad?" I asked.

"It's something you get used to," Kingsley reassured me.

By this point, I had started worrying about how I was going to approach the whole Wizard Talk thing. No matter how I framed it, I knew it wasn't going to go well. From their perspective, their daughter disappears for three days, suddenly reappears, tells you she's a wizard, Magical Britain's Chosen One, and also the child of Lily Potter. Lily, who Petunia hated enough to lock Harry in a cupboard.

Never mind trying to persuade them that they'd already known all this but had their memories wiped.

No matter how much I wanted to avoid explaining, though, it was their right to know. I had spent the better part of a decade lying to the family who had taken me in, shown me warmth and kindness and treated me as well as their own son. They deserved as much of the truth as I could afford to give them, even if it came in the form of a made-up Obliviate.

But wait - what if someone had already been here? Snape or Dumbledore or McGonagall, here to cross-reference what I'd said, or put the blood wards back up, or any of a myriad of reasons. In that situation I would already have two very angry Dursleys waiting for me.

I was thinking myself in circles. This had never happened in the books, so I couldn't approach it as if I already knew how the whole thing was going to play out. My best option was to calm down and play it by ear; I knew what story to stick to, and past that I could deal with problems as they appeared.

As we rounded the corner onto Privet Drive, my resolve hardened.

And then it shattered into a million pieces.

#4 Privet Drive was gone, burnt right down to the foundations. Gone was the pristine white facade. Gone were the rose bushes Petunia was so proud of, the envy of the neighborhood. Gone was the garage door Vernon always left open so everyone could see his expensive car. Gone was everything I'd called by own for the past eight years save for the clothes on my back and the backpack on my arm.

The world shrunk down to nothing save my thoughts and the image of those smoldering remains burned onto the inside of my eyelids.

Kingsley said something, but it was all static to my ears, because #4 Privet Drive was gone and the Dursleys were dead.

I'd thought that leaving would keep them safe, that the prospect of catching the Girl-Who-Lived out on her own would be much more enticing than a random family of Muggles. Besides, it wasn't like they were really my family, either for Rowle's purposes or my own.

I was wrong.

Privet Drive was home.

The Dursleys were family.

Now they were gone, and it was my fault.

For years I'd treated the Dursleys like caricatures from the book. Destroying that letter all those years ago had been a means to an end - a way to avoid becoming their own personal servant, not to become their daughter. I'd played my role dutifully with the knowledge of their alternate actions hanging over my head, never once considering them in light of what they had done over what they hadn't. They'd taken in a stranger, treated me as their own, shown me the same love and affection as their own son.

I'd taken it for granted.

Lily and James were a tragedy, but the inevitability of their deaths lessened the blow. Harry Potter or Elizabeth Potter, Voldemort would still have come. Their blood wasn't on my hands.

The Dursleys were different.

Three people were dead, three people who would have survived the war if I'd never taken the place of Harry Potter. Even if Rowle had pulled the trigger, it may as well have been my hand holding the gun.

I barely noticed the second round of Apparition; I paid no attention to the Ministry Atrium, or the crowd that gathered to gawk at me. I followed Kingsley past the sign-in desk, down the elevator, through a door labelled _Auror Office_ , and into a cubicle.

"Stay here," he ordered. "I'll get everything sorted out."

I sat at that desk for a long time. My brain was like a broken record, a constant stream of _your fault your fault your fault._

Now and then, a stray thought would interject. _They might have survived,_ whispered the hopeful part of my mind.

I crushed it down. _What kind of worthless fucking Death Eater wouldn't take the time to make sure they're dead?_

I didn't know how much time had passed when a hand on my shoulder brought me back to this world.

"Miss Potter?" a woman's voice asked softly.

I turned to face her. She looked to be in her early thirties, with just a few lines starting to appear on her face. Her hair was an ashy brown, worn in a braid over one shoulder, which in combination with her grey robes made her look, in a word, faded.

My brain supplied her name: _Karina Proudfoot_. According to the article I'd read earlier, she'd apprehended Rowle. Had I really read that today? It felt like a million years ago.

"Your Muggles are alive," she began.

Alive.

Not dead.

 _Alive_.

I hadn't killed them.

"Rowle lit your house on fire before coming after you."

 _What kind of worthless fucking Death Eater wouldn't take the time to make sure they're dead?_

( _One with bigger fish to fry.)_

"They saw him, and were trying to tell your Muggle authorities about Magic, so we sent Obliviators to adjust their story."

 _They were Obliviated_.

I was torn between laughing and crying, because they were alive, and they were _Obliviated_.

Because the lie I'd prepared to cover my own ass was only one step away from the truth.

I settled for a half-choked noise that was somewhere between a snort and a sob.

Auror Proudfoot led me back up through the Ministry, scaring off several wizards who tried to introduce themselves with a hawkish glare. As the elevator prepared to deposit us in the Atrium, she grabbed my shoulder and crouched down to look me in the eyes.

"I don't want you to be caught off guard," she said, "After seeing you come in there's bound to be a mob hoping to catch a glimpse of the Girl-Who-Lived. Just stay close to me and try to ignore them."

"Okay," I replied.

 _Stand up straight,_ I ordered myself as the doors opened. _Head up, shoulders back, eyes forward. You're a symbol, act like one._

I didn't know what I'd looked like on the way in - a mess, probably - but now that I was in a little more control of myself, I was going to put my best foot forward.

But I wasn't quite prepared for just how _many_ people there were. The instant we passed through the security checkpoint, we were mobbed. "Miss Potter!" yelled a dozen reporters, before their questions were lost in the roar of the crowd. I couldn't help flinching when the first camera went off right in my face.

Proudfoot was unphased. "No questions at this time!" she yelled, shoving her way through the crowd and pulling me along with her.

By the time we made it to the Apparition point, my eyes were burning from the cameras and my ears were ringing from the noise. So much for looking dignified.

Apparition Round Three was better than the first time, but still unpleasant, and I stumbled as we landed in a parking lot.

"This is where your Muggles are staying, for now," the Auror explained.

I didn't know whether to call the building in front of me a nice motel or a shabby hotel, but either way it was far below the Dursleys' usual standards.

As we crossed the lot, Proudfoot slipped her DMLE badge into the pocket of her robes, but didn't otherwise try to disguise her magical attire. We walked straight into the lobby, where a middle-aged man was sitting at the desk.

"Excuse me," said Proudfoot, "Which room are the Dursleys staying in?"

He gave her a once-over, looking skeptical. "They said nothing 'bout expecting any guests. I'll dial up and let 'em know someone's here for 'em."

Proudfoot sighed, and I watched disbelieving as she whipped out her wand and waved it in front of the man's face. " _Confundo_ ," she murmured.

The man shuddered, before furrowing his brow and letting his mouth slip open just a little, bemused.

"The Dursleys mentioned they'd be expecting guests. Could you remind me which room they're in?" the Auror asked, more strongly than before.

"301," he answered. "Tell 'em to lemme know if there's anything else they need, ma'am."

The Auror started off towards the elevators without so much as a thank you, and I was slow to follow, still aghast at how casually she'd just bewitched the man.

Should I say something? As we entered the elevator I opened my mouth, but words failed me and I closed it.

What would I even say? How could I express how wrong that was after she treated it so casually?

The elevator doors opened to the third floor, and we stepped out, heading in the direction of room 301.

It was like the man at the desk wasn't even a person to her. Not in the pureblood supremacist 'dirty subhuman' way, but more like an 'exotic pet' kind of way. I remembered how Proudfoot had referred to the Dursleys when telling me they were alive: "your Muggles," she had called them.

My opinion of the witch had taken a nosedive. I found myself hoping that Vernon was gone - he wasn't the kind to respond well to being talked-down to.

We stopped. _301,_ read the numbers on the door. Proudfoot knocked twice.

"Diddikins?" called a painfully familiar from the other side of the door. "Did you forget your key again, sweetums?"

I heard the lock unlatch, and then the door opened.

And then Petunia was squeezing me tightly, and crying, and whoever was cutting onions needed to _stop_ , because there was no way I was crying too even as I felt tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.

"Oh, Margie," she sobbed, "I was worried sick!"

I murmured reassurances to her, even though her worries had been completely real. I'd thought they were dead, but she didn't know that I really had died. Not an hour ago I'd been as devastated by their loss as they were by mine.

After several long minutes, I felt Petunia shift, and then slowly pull away. I looked up at her; Petunia was staring hard at Proudfoot. I knew what she was just now taking in: the robes, the DMLE badge, the wand holster at her waist.

Then Petunia looked me in the eyes, as if searching for something. Was she finally seeing Lily's eyes in my own? Had she explained away any resemblance as coincidence all these years?

My aunt rounded on Proudfoot. "What have you-you _freaks_ done to my daughter?!"

"That's your niece, ma'am," the witch explained slowly, as if talking to a child.

"My sister's freak family isn't dead." It sounded more like Petunia was trying to convince herself than us.

"They've been dead for eight years."

I put on the same expression Dudley wore when he saw Petunia stuffing stockings instead of Santa: bewildered, with a little bit of horror, as if the world was falling apart around him.

"Aunt Petunia, you told me about Mom and Dad last year, remember?"

My aunt's expression, meanwhile, was morphing into one of disgust and disbelief. She opened her mouth to reply, only to get beaten to it by Proudfoot.

"It's understandable if you're confused, Mrs. Dursley. When we modified your memories-"

"Stay OUT of our family's head!" Petunia yelled over her, then pulled me inside the hotel room and slammed the door in the witch's face.

"Aunt Petunia," I began quietly after the door closed.

She cut me off, sounding pained. "We'll talk about this when your fath- when your uncle is home."

Petunia went into the bedroom of the suite, closing the door behind her and leaving me alone in the living room.

Just then came the voice of Proudfoot through the door. "Sometimes related memories are lost when something gets modified! I'll check to see if there was a newbie handling them. If they still can't remember you in a few days, shoot me an owl and I'll see what I can do about fixing them!"

"Okay," I called in response, having absolutely no intention of doing so.

I felt dirty enough messing with my family's heads without magic; I wasn't going to make them go through that again. Any consequences that came from that would be ones I'd deserve.

After mentally chewing out Proudfoot for her treatment of regular people, I'd been just as willing to do the same, even if I hadn't used magic to do it. Was I really any better?

I sat down on the hotel room's couch, turned on the TV, and waited.

Vernon didn't take it much better than Petunia had. He went purple upon hearing that 'freaks' had come along and rewritten his memories, and while he initially reserved his rage for the Ministry, it didn't take long for the blame to fall to me.

By the time we moved back into the newly-rebuilt house, there was a firm barrier in place between me and the rest of my family. The Dursleys seemed to go back and forth between two ideas: that I was part of a conspiracy and had lied to them since the moment I'd arrived; and that I'd killed and replaced poor, innocent, _normal_ Margie.

Petunia could barely even look at me, let alone call me by name. I was now 'Girl' to her. Vernon spoke to me, sometimes, but if he called me by name it was by Margaret now, and he never said more than a few words.

A few days after we moved back a Ministry employee came by to discuss the matter of wards. Vernon listened to him, sort of, but insisted he wasn't paying a single penny for any "mumbo-jumbo" to be put on the house, and if my safety was really so important for Magical Britain then the Ministry could pay for it. In the end the wards were reinstalled in the dead of night, to keep the neighbors from seeing, and I think they ended up charging it to my vault.

Apart from that lone visit, we were cut off from the Wizarding World entirely. The letters had stopped coming - no more bank statements, or birthday gifts, or threatening messages. Without my wand, the only magic I really had access to was my summoning charm. My magic stubbornly refused any other attempts to master wandless spells. If not for the galleons that stayed in my backpack I could almost believe the whole thing had never happened.

Being cut off from magic made it that much harder to deal with the behavior of my family. I'd hoped that destroying Dumbledore's letter and painting a pretty lie about Obliviation would keep me out of the cupboard, and it did - barely. My aunt and uncle became dutiful, but not warm. I wasn't their personal house elf, but I was an unwanted guest.

I set myself an alarm to wake up. Petunia would leave me breakfast on the table, but it wouldn't be warm. On the drive to and from school I'd be ignored - on several occasions they'd "forget" me and I had to walk home. My birthday presents were reduced from a Dudley-sized pile to some money and nothing else.

Neither addressed me unless they absolutely had to.

But that was what I wanted, wasn't it? I didn't want - _had never wanted_ \- the doting affection, so why did I feel like I was missing something when it was gone?

I thought the whole thing would blow over; I thought soon enough, everything would be back to normal. But weeks turned into months, and months turned into years. The walls stayed up.

The only good thing about the silence was that I had time to think. My notes on the plot, on spells, on anything about canon I'd considered important enough to write down were burned up in the blaze, so I used my free time to reconstruct them as best I could. I knew I was missing details - probably important ones, with my luck - but I'd have to make do with what I had.

I also considered the False Potter, as I'd come to think of him. I didn't like missing that piece of the puzzle, especially because it related to how I'd come to be here, and because in the craziness of Dumbledore and the Dursleys I'd forgotten just what he'd said about me.

I knew that my Horcrux was gone, but it was the implications of this that were most concerning. What did this mean for Quirrell? The Basilisk? The Graveyard?

My deadline was the end of fourth year, because I was pretty sure that if I let the graveyard go as it was written, I would die.

I had irrevocably destroyed the timeline before I turned ten years old; blindly following the books would only get me killed. If I wanted to fix the mess I'd already made, I'd have to change things, and change them _hard._

If I wanted to survive, I'd have to get rid of my biggest advantage.

So be it.

There was an unspoken anticipation in the air as my 11th birthday neared, an acknowledgement that soon I'd be leaving the Muggle world

On July 24th, 1991, the letter arrived.

* * *

 **A/N:** It's alive! The college student life does not lend itself well to fanfiction writing, unfortunately. This entire semester's just been one thing after another, and I only finished this chapter while procrastinating on an essay. I'll probably be writing more as it gets into summer - expect a much shorter wait between Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.

Initially, this whole thing was going to be two chapters - the Ministry had much less communication between departments, and Leo ended up having to spend the night elsewhere before reuniting with the Dursleys at Margie's funeral. That version turned out to be way too hard to write in addition to being incredibly corny, so I ended up scrapping it.

In other news, we're through with the pre-canon arc! I can't speak for about anyone else, but I tend to get pretty impatient with too much pre-canon setup, so I'm sorry for taking two years to get through it. The Hogwarts letter is showing up, and next chapter will bring us to Diagon Alley and onwards. I'm really, really excited to get into First Year!

-Arameyy


End file.
